"Jewish Gentle" and Other Stories of Gay-Jewish Living
Reviews are in:
"[T]he most powerful collection of short stories about gay Jews ...[in] more than 20 years." Wayne Hoffman, Jewish Book Council's Jewish Book World.
*******************************************************************The acclaimed novel of a gay Jewish man's lusty and spiritual adventures in Amsterdam
— now back in print!
THE LIMITS OF PLEASURE
A novel by Daniel M. Jaffe
On Chanukah Eve, December 1, 2010, Bear Bones Books, an imprint of Lethe Press, published its first novel, a reprint of author Daniel M. Jaffe’s acclaimed book, The Limits of Pleasure, a Finalist for one of ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Awards upon initial publication in 2001.
With great humor and sensitivity, The Limits of Pleasure follows Dave Miller, a sexy forty-year-old bearish man living in Boston, as he survives an escalating inner skirmish to reconcile his Jewish and gay identities.
A year after the death of his Holocaust-surviving grandmother, Dave leaves Boston for Amsterdam, the home of Anne Frank, whom his Grandma revered. Dave, feeling undeserving to confront the suffering that Grandma endured in the concentration camps, cannot bring himself to visit Anne Frank’s house.
Angry with himself and the world, Dave repeatedly seeks out risky erotic trysts that mix sacred ritual with profane hedonism. When he meets Alexander, a sexually reserved Dutchman of Indonesian heritage who has identity conflicts of his own, the relationship shakes both men’s lives to their core.
“I can only testify to the riveting effect this book has had on me . . . truly groundbreaking . . . a brilliant author. . .The canon itself quakes, shudders, and then invites the likes of The Limits of Pleasure in, as it so emphatically must. Daniel Jaffe has done a great thing: made a fresh pilgrimage to the age-old human well, where sex and death, good-hearted secularism and the promptings of an ambiguous Higher Power, revolutionism and blood fealty all roil the pond from surface to sediment.”
— Sydney Lea, Pulitzer Prize Finalist author of Pursuit of a Wound; Founding Editor of New England Review