SHORT STORIES

"[Stollman] explores with great sensitivity our human frustrations with a universe that remains suspended somewhere between science and religion, appearing exquisitely rational at times but ultimately defying scientific explanation... Stollman seeks in The Dialogues of Time and Entropy to provide a suggestive literary framework for reconciling the wonders of science, the inexplicable power of desire and the mysteries of God."  (Read more of this review)

""What is a person?" a minor character asks in one of the stories in this radiant new collection. The question cuts to the heart of Aryeh Lev Stollman's most essential concern. For through spare, understated prose, Stollman, a neuroradiologist, magically accesses the emotional core of his human subjects...

"Ah, the soul. Not since Saul Bellow, perhaps, has an American writer so thoughtfully troubled over this fundamental concept. The literary landscape is currently crowded with light entertainments, often slickly told in present tense. Stollman's weightier fictions — elegantly written and wise — returns literature to its rightful role."

"...That [Stollman] succeeds so admirably is testament to a writer who can juggle the subtle ways in which the past (often a Holocaust past) imposes itself on the present or how the pain of this world is transcended into radiant visions of other possibilities — as he spins out sentences that dazzle in and of themselves. I can think of no other contemporary Jewish writer who brings such varied learning and such a penetrating intelligence to the enterprise of fiction writing. In his short stories, perhaps even more so than in his novels, Stollman remains a marvel — richer, wiser and more humane as one haunting tale fades into another."

"Aryeh Lev Stollman['s] first collection of short stories, The Dialogues of Time and Entropy, is in a league all its own... Stollman is what I imagine would emerge in the unlikely event that Stephen King and Cynthia Ozick were to raise a child together; he is by turns eerie and melancholy, acute in his understanding of the human mind, and vague about whether or not this understanding can ever help one get to the bottom of the human experience. His stories would be outrageous if they did not ring true in their humanity... Stollman is intensely and passionately Jewish, and does not shy away from the mystical, nor does he see it as a separate matter from day-to-day life. But his characters all harbor some type of genius, which shapes — or unshapes — their humanity... Stollman is so vastly knowledgeable about art, music, science, linguistics and religion, one wonders when he has time to practice medicine, or, for that matter, to write. Plumbing the depths of genius ought to be done by someone who is in touch with the phenomenon, which this physician and writer clearly is."