New York 1, Tel Aviv 0: Stories by Shelly Oria

New York 1, Tel Aviv 0: Stories Reviews

• 
  Philip Shaw

  Here's the voice I have been looking for. These stories are captivating and original. With my favorites being: My Wife in Converse; Maybe in a Different Time; This Way I Don't Have to Be; and the ultimate, deliciously devastating: Wait. What a collection! While my enjoyment of this collection was complete-so it's really neither here nor there-the title story was my least favorite and I guess I mention this in case another reader has a similar experience (the title story being the first one in the book)... I just encourage you to please, please, please read on. This is a great voice, a wonderful writer, saying so much about our current times without a soapbox to be seen.
• 
  David

  The love and sex lives of commitment averse young Israeli ex-pats in New York. In addition to the Russian and Persian contributions to Jewish-American immigrant fiction in recent years we now have an Israeli too. But unlike the Persians and to a lesser extent the Russians, young single Israelis can go back and forth between their native and adoptive countries without having to put down roots. An auspicious debut. I look forward to this author's future work. Used copies are available in the USA from on-line vendors for a penny plus shipping ($4 total).
• 
  Mary

  This is a gorgeous book.
  
  As I enter the fitting room, I close the door and stand in my underwear in front of the mirror, afraid. I want to feel that my life cannot go on without this dress. It's a beige dress with a white collar. There are tiny white butterflies all over, but you need to look closely to see. I slow down, slow down, slow down. But I can't slow down enough. The moment still comes when I try it on and don't fall in love. Falling in love never comes easy to me. I look at my disappointment. I say to my disappointment, Let's keep trying. There is no intention in me when I say it, no truth. But I say it again, because even the worst lie turns real if you repeat it enough. Let's keep trying.
• 
  Michael Podlasek Kent

  Found the stories to be hits or misses. Loved the idea from the second to last story, My Wife in Converse, that the past does not so much tell us about the future as our future will help us better understand our past. That’ll stick with me for a while.
• 
  Maayan K

  I usually don't love short stories in rerospect as much as novels just because I easily forget them. Just as things are building and you start to get interested there's a tantalizing ending.
  
  While this collection elicits those same feelings, I still enjoyed reading it. It's a pretty sexy book. While the characters are lonely and stymied in various ways, at least most of them are getting some. I liked that some of the stories rather delicately reflect a modern Israeli-American experience, which is something I've never read about in literary fiction before. There's no pretension to represent anyone or summarize Israelis in America into a social/political phenomenon that says something in particular, which I appreciate. Still there's resonance there that is specific and interesting.
  
  I liked the longer stories better, with the exception of "Wait" - short and wonderful. The ones with less standard form or more fantastical content seem to be slipping away from me already. But there are many strong stories, including the last one.
  
  Many of the stories involve non-heterosexual and fluid sexuality, especially between women, which the author seems to write about with some authority (authority on messed up queer relationships that is, not in an academic sense). One thing I noticed was that two of the stories ("New York 1, Tel Aviv 0", and "The Thing About Sophia") are inhabited by one-dimensional lesbian manic-pixie-dream-girls. I didn't know that this was an archetype that permeates the queer community as well, but apparently it is, and it's just as annoying.
  
  Still, recommended. Shelley Oria, who writes in English even though she grew up speaking Hebrew, has no problems in the writing department, which is tight and free of affectations, sometimes even surprising, witty, and deep, with a slight lilt of foreignness which is captivating.
• 
  Sara

  The first thing you notice about the work of Shelly Oria is her voice: how it crackles, the syntax, startling in a way that’s almost reminiscent of Etgar Keret – and yet, Keret’s voice I’ve only read in translation, which makes Oria’s even more striking. Her original English shimmers with the hint of another tongue in both rhythm and diction, all of which lends refreshing wit to her prose. I cannot say enough about her language, how crisp and rich it is, rife with offhand wisdom, at once playful and possessed with an honesty that makes you think, pen giddy from highlighting lines that capture the absurdity of The American Way: “When there’s no miscalculation involved, too much food is simply called supper.”
  
  Full review of this collection at Trop Mag:
  http://tropmag.com/2014/loyal-to-both...
• 
  AdiTurbo

  This collection of stories is a good representation of the mentality of the writer's generation. It has some brilliant moments and strong sentences, but is not even in the level of stories. Some have magical realism elements in them, which I usually dislike, and mostly did here. Many deal with LGBT and alternative romantic and sexual relationships, which I know nothing about and therefore found it hard to relate to. Belonging to a different, older generation, I don't think I fully understood some of the decisions and behaviors some of the characters displayed. I enjoyed some of the insights about Israel, but thought others were a little condescending and inaccurate - more stereotypes than realities. In short, I am ambivalent about this book. It has its merits, but maybe it's not exactly for me.
• 
  Sara

  Thank you to GoodReads First Reads for sending me a complimentary copy of this book!
  
  This is my first review - I never write reviews, but winners are asked to write reviews to show appreciation to the publisher for sending a free copy. With that said, I'm probably not the best person to ask to write a review on this book as I did not connect with it...at....all! I did not look forward to picking it up to find out what happened next. I didn't like the writing style. I just didn't like it at all. I really wanted to like it. I wanted to find a connection to any character or any one of the short stories, which is why I kept picking it up and thinking the next short story may grab me more. I'm not a critic and I'm no expert, so don't take my word for it.
• 
  Orion (elfspectations)

  What I liked was the author's stream of consciousness writing style. It felt like someone was telling me a story over coffee rather than reading a book because they were written in a very conversational way. Even though they were all written in a similar storytelling style, the author was able to give each narrator an individual voice and all their circumstances were drastically different.
  
  I definitely had trouble connecting with the characters though, they made poor choices and loved the wrong people. It was heartbreak after heartbreak and it took me about 4 months to read this book because I needed a lot of breaks because it kept making me sad.
• 
  Sarah Olson

  I really hated the first few stories, and almost gave up on the book. I muscled through because it was harder than you'd think to find an author with my same initials for the 2015 reading challenge. The later stories were better, but I felt like the author was trying too hard to be edgy for the sake of being edgy rather than because the subject of the story required it.
• 
  Rachel

  Much like the last book I read--RED CLOCKS by Leni Zumas--I'm rating this one a low four. And I'm doing so for similar reasons!
  
  These stories are largely stream-of-consciousness, light on the physical detail and narrative exposition. I feel like I should be more open to this in the short form, but I don't really think it's for me. Oria writes stories like "Documentation" and "Fully Zipped," which uses headers to delineate between different kisses that a couple shares or a woman's experience with salespersons in the dressing room. And that's the crux of it.
  
  As always, the stories that stick with me are the most graspable and traditional. In the titular story, "New York 1, Tel Aviv 0," the protagonist is in a polygamous relationship and negotiating her place between a woman who always wants more and a man who really only wants the other woman. In "The Disneyland of Albany," which I think might be my favorite story, a man chases his dream across continents to be recognized as an artist but his patrons are only interested in his political situation and his family is moving on without him. And in "This Way I Don't Have To Be," a grief counselor sleeps with married men to assuage her own loneliness and a female friend tries to impart her own brand of counseling.
  
  Thematically, besides loneliness, a lot of the stories with meat on their bones deal with Tel Avivians in New York, facing different realities. Some of the shorter stories do that as well. The one that stuck with me the most was "Tzfirah," where the second person narrator ruminates on sirens in Israel and how they signify both memorial and the warning of hostilities. Many of the other short stories are about interior emotions, and although I could relate, perhaps the broader conflict gave me something more tangible.
  
  Which leads me to the point that this is the short of stream-of-consciousness that can be more taxing to read--rambling paragraphs without quotation marks for dialogue. That last one is a personal pet peeve.
  
  There was one, longer magical realism story that actually worked decently well for me-- "The Beginning of a Plan," where the protagonist discovers that she can stop time. The worldly ramifications for that, such as Oria explains some of them, are about as deep as a piece of paper, but I liked it for the metaphor of relationships and personal desire.
  
  So I feel like the emotions were real--I especially like the space afforded to bisexual women--but the execution wasn't to my taste.
• 
  kell_xavi

  2.5
  
  Many of these stories begin with long paragraphs of narrative summary, and in most of them, the summary continues and overshadows the action for the whole of the story. I liked the more realistic stories better, as I didn't feel the speculative elements Oria brought in often added any nuance to the character interactions or greater intention.
  
  A couple of the shorter stories, "Tzfirah" and "Wait" especially, worked well and had an edge that reminded me of Lydia Davis. A bit of Trinie Dalton, a bit of Sue Goyette (but not as positive comparison).
  
  I liked the exploration of a relationship between Israeli and American identity, notably the title piece, "The Disneyland of Albany" and "Tzfirah," again.
  
  I like the bisexual awareness Oria strives for in stories including the title piece, "My Wife in Converse," and "The Thing About Sophia," though most of these pieces fell flat for me; the narrators in all three view the women they're in sexual/romantic relationships with as a kind of ideal, something greater than themselves, when none of these women are particularly interesting or likeable.
  
  The pieces most worth reading, for me, were:
  
  New York, Tel Aviv
  Wait
  Documentation
  This Way I Don't Have to Be
  The Beginning of a Plan (though it took a long time to get into it)
  Tzfirah
  Beep
  
  I'd try this author again, but more likely a novel than shorts.
• 
  Parker

  I really liked the prose of these stories, but few of them really stood out to me or are likely to be remembered later. I feel like the author should expand more on the character types that she writes, because many of these stories seemed be focused on a female character who is alluring and mysterious, but very fickle. At least 3 of the stories in this book are about our narrator struggling to keep the love and attention of this fickle female. It gets a little dull with such frequent repetition. The best stories in my opinion were "New York 1, Tel Aviv 0", "Beep", "The Thing About Sophia", "None The Wiser", "That Night", "Documentation", "The Beginning Of A Plan", "Maybe In A Different Time", and "Tzfirah"
• 
  Sara

  This collection of short stories focusing mostly on the Israeli expatriate experience in New York City is best when it is rooted in the realistic. The few stories that are more fantastical or allegorical didn't quite land, but when Oria is thinking about women and their relationships and struggles, many of these stories resonated. In the opening, titular story, Oria writes, "I've always felt the present is just one way of looking at things," a sentiment that follows through much of the collection as the characters try to navigate their presents and think about how their pasts made them who they are.
• 
  Félise

  The relationship chronicled in kisses was an interesting format, and the one about the painter who left the family had some substance, but as a whole, this is not the book I thought I'd be reading based on the summary. The first couple stories were sex-centric without any graphic scenes, and in most of these tales I couldn't tell whether the narrator was male or female; everyone's voice was pretty much the same. It does seem like there are some good premises that would be interesting if they were fleshed out more, even as just novellas.
• 
  Corita

  In my humble opinion, she has the freshest new voice in fiction. I normally hate short stories some of these were so good I actually reread them 2-3 times. She somehow drew me in with a story of just a few pages! Please please, Shelly Oria, publish a novel ASAP!
• 
  Karli Sherwinter

  I couldn’t necessarily relate to the characters in this short story collection, but I enjoyed them and liked the various perspectives they represented. Since it is a quick read, the pessimistic tone didn’t frustrate me too much.
• 
  riley

  4.5
• 
  Sab

  Solid 4 stars. Such diverse stories and the best parts were lgbt themed. Loved the book.
• 
  Sunil

  I discovered Shelly Oria at Writers with Drinks, where she read from "My Wife in Converse" and made nearly every line laugh-out-loud hilarious with her delivery, savoring each quirky observation ("He was a man in his sixties trying hard to look French. He smelled like years of garlic.") or cutting mundanity ("She looked at me like I had something on my face, but I knew that I didn't."). I flipped through the book and found deliciously witty lines in "Fully Zipped" ("As I enter the fitting room, the woman says, My name is Andy, if you need anything. What is your name if I don't need anything? I ask.") that convinced me to pick up the book.
  
  New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 mostly delivers on the promise of its title in that it features depictions of life in New York and Tel Aviv, featuring Israeli characters in Israel as well as Israelis in New York. Since literary fiction is usually Fiction About White People, it was nice to get this perspective. Oria portrays the minute details of Israeli life likely unfamiliar to most Americans, discusses the awkwardness of racial identity when it comes to the political situation, and examines the peculiarities of expressing oneself in Hebrew. In addition, the stories feature many queer characters; the first story is about a polyamorous trio and some first-person stories that focused on relationships with women broke my heteronormative goggles when I realized the narrator was a woman. Since literary fiction is usually Fiction About Straight People, it was nice to get this perspective.
  
  Unfortunately, only a handful of stories truly grabbed me, usually because of their unusual structure. In "Wait," a woman instructs the man she left how to interact with the woman after her, and she is completely aware she has no right to do this, which makes her simultaneously sympathetic and shrewish. "Documentation" documents a relationship through numbered kisses, and it's heartbreaking ("Kiss #288 gives me false hope, which, without the perspective of time, appears simply as hope."). The aforementioned "Fully Zipped" follows a woman in various fitting rooms, trying to make a human connection as well as a sartorial one. "The Beginning of a Plan" delves into a magical realist science fiction, with "time-stops" where, uh, time stops. Everywhere. Occasionally. The concept drew me in more than the story, though.
  
  Which gets to the heart of the issue. Maybe it's because I've been reading SFF short fiction all year and I haven't been reading much litfic lately, but even when I liked elements of a story and felt for the characters—thanks to the language—I rarely felt satisfied at the end. Did anything really happen? How am I supposed to feel? That's a strange image, what does it mean? The stories have no clear plot; rather, they generally follow a relationship, maybe from its inception to its dissolution (which can be a plot), or, like in "The Thing About Sophia," take us on a trip through a week in the life of a relationship, give us a snapshot. The book feels like a lot of snapshots. Lovely snapshots, to be sure, but they all washed over me without leaving a permanent impression.
  
  I enjoyed many parts of New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, but as a whole, I didn't connect with it.
• 
  Savannah Jane

  Shelly Oria's collection of short stories is truly beautiful prose. Having won this from a Goodreads giveaway, I gave it a chance, not expecting the impact it would proceed to have on me. While all of the stories are about love in one form or another, most of them are about love lost. Oftentimes, what characters gain in each other, they lose in themselves, and this is the true tragedy of these stories. We are introduced to a woman in a polygamous relationship who just can't stay loyal, an artist who moves to New York to provide for his family but loses them back in Tel Aviv and struggles to reconnect, a man who cannot stop giving himself to other people in the most literal way, a selfless woman who reminds her ex-husband that it is okay to find new love. We learn about the power of a kiss, of 99 kisses, of 289 kisses. If before we did not know the magnitude of love and its ability to break us into a thousand pieces and put us back together again only to break us once more, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 teaches us this important lesson.
  
  In stunning fluid language, Oria describes human emotions in a way so we can visualize it, not just feel it. The most difficult and impressive thing about short stories is that an author must make their readers fall in love with the characters in so few words; they must tell a story, beginning to end, in the few pages they allow. Shelly Oria does this passionately and effortlessly.
  
  After reading this collection, it can be guaranteed that readers walk away from it with a heavy heart and heavier eyelids. I have come away from the book understanding myself deeper: my restlessness has been explained, the occasional holes in my soul are being rebuilt as I type, my need to be loved is no longer an impediment, but an achievement. I have read this book and have come away having learned the art of compassion, of true love, of heartache, and of human power.
• 
  Marvin

  Stories about young Israelis come to the States, mostly. Lot of women narrators, many of them lesbians or bisexual. The best in this collection touch notes of unsurety and longing, while others rely on the novelty of fantastical elements to carry their weight. Prose is smooth, but the narratives often seem a bit disjointed, or playing at it; paragraphs frequently are separated by the break of white space into their own sections of text. Highlighted perhaps by the discussion of such breaks in poetry, within the story, in "My Wife In Converse." Sometimes intriguing, sometimes difficult to find the why.
  
  Highlights: a polyamorous trio deals with infidelity and desire in the title story; the cataloguing of kisses and what they meant by a woman following the failure of a relationship in "Documentation"; an artist father takes his daughter on a business trip to spend more time with her on her visit from Israel, reflecting on his living apart from her and her mother and his home country, in "The Disneyland Of Albany"; a woman battles her compulsion to bed married men in "This Way I Don't Have To Be"; a woman tries on clothes and ponders interaction in "Fully Zipped"; Israeli call to remembrance in "Tzfirah"; and in "My Wife In Converse" a woman watches the possible collapse of her marriage while trying to write a poem."
• 
  Elie

  This didn't feel so much like short stories as it felt like a book of samples. Most of these stories felt unfinished, like Shelly Oria wrote bits and pieces of stories, sometimes the beginning, but sometimes more like a random, completed scene, and then put them together in a binder for her publisher saying "here are ideas of what i could write about, pick one for me to expand on" and they just published the binder. It felt a lot like my fic folder, actually.
  Which is not to say it was bad, i actually quite liked it, it was just a bit frustrating sometimes because i would have loved for a lot of these to be expanded on. Sometimes it just felt like too little, you know?
  
  Otherwise i loved the style. Very simple, and yet very evocative. Most of these were "regular" fiction, but surprisingly a few were weird, interesting sci-fiction. I would definitely have liked more of that Time-Stop universe. I also love how casual the sci-fi is too. How casual everything is. A lot of the stories have a gay element, which is treated very casually (which, YES!), including the first story, which is about a polyamory relationship. It was very interesting. And i loved loved loved that.
  
  Also, the israeli element, which is half of what drew me to this book in the first place.
• 
  Jesse

  I felt distinctly ambivalent, I guess. I love the jangly openness of the sentences and the fluidity of the characters' sexual identities here, as well as Oria's notion that we can all...sort of reinvent ourselves, except that we keep dragging things behind us--concepts, visions of who we are or were. But what bugged me was the short-story bits--those little nibbles at you where you could feel Thematic Points being tallied, with a line of dialogue that a person wouldn't say but that Illuminate The Major Themes Of This Story. I kept feeling slightly unwilling to suspend my disbelief. And having recently read Molly Antopol's collection, her Jewish-intellectual stories are better and more resonant than Oria's Jewish-intellectual stories. (Also, to be honest, the main female figure in these stories, who's basically the same person even if she gets different names and bank accounts in different contexts, just would make me nuts. So as an attempt to cathect a relationship with her into fiction, this made me feel like saying, hey, just dump her, she's not worth it.) The last two stories were, to me, the best, with the closer really nailing what Oria can do.
• 
  Jake Goretzki

  [C/o City Lights]
  
  Plenty of rewarding moments, but often a little flat.
  
  The Israeli-emigre-in-the-US angle gives it an interesting edge and explores a dilemma that many will have heard of - and that's novel enough. Of the stories, The 'Disneyland of Albany' is the strongest, I thought. I really like the tension between the parents played out by the child and there's a satisfying resolution of sorts. Political, yeah. Some fun exercises too in the mild surreal ('The Beep'). 'None the Wiser' was also rather good (clearly, she's very thoughtfully 'none the wiser'. Which was pretty funny).
  
  But others felt flat and insubstantial to me. I dunno: that voice and those settings - the drifting, listless artist in their 30s or 40s, living in a hip metropolis amid brunches with clever people - I feel I've read of them so often.
  
  I've yet to read any Lydia Davis, but I found myself wondering 'Is that what Lydia Davis is like?'. Two adults in an apartment; sixteen sparse paragraphs over four pages; someone is making a soup; soup gets burned; writer goes to other room to work on poem; it starts raining. I should go and read some Lydia Davis.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Caitlin

  Oria's collection is a joy to read, an astonishing, exciting, intelligent debut.
  
  Usually, what I look for in stories is characters who feel alive to me. Oria's characters live in a new way, almost as if they are one step ahead of the language that manifests them, coming off the page, reaching for connection. The characters ask of you, too, and the moments that you meet them refract with a  complicated light, humor and sadness and seduction and withdrawal, all at once. A parting of veils. Oria's skill lies not only in opening and holding such complex worlds with us, but also in making that reckoning with complexity so pleasurable.
  
  Map Oria near Lorrie Moore or Amy Hempel or Junot Diaz, but these comparisons are only affinities. Mostly she is new, and creating a space for us to ask for more from our stories.
• 
  Lauren Nisbet

  I always feel slightly cheated when I read short story collections. It’s like just when I get settled in and ready to enjoy my reading experience it gets cut off and I’m left confused and unsatisfied – it’s very frustrating. I also find it difficult to review collections because short stories should really stand on their own – a story is written by itself and exists within its own universe, but things get confused when a story is pushed up against other, similar universes. Suddenly its like the short story is part of a larger narrative, but one where each chapter has different characters, a different narrator and a different plot. It’s all very confusing. I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it...
  
  Full review:
  https://thoughtsonmybookshelf.wordpre...
• 
  Drew

  2.5 out of 5.
  I just wish I could've related to or enjoyed more of the stories in the collection, overall. For the most part, I found myself skimming - because there was little new or engaging here. The stories are well-written, although they wear their author's Israeli identity aggressively at times, but they felt like pieces from a club I haven't been invited to yet: the New York (specifically Brooklyn) young-writer "scene". I'm a young writer in New York and am certainly part of the literary scene... but there's a little too much effort put into "being literary" here. When Oria relaxes and just writes something for fun, it shows: the story grabs you. The others, they don't grab as much.
  
  More at RB:
  http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2015/05...