Critical Praise

"This first-ever English translation of Keilson’s gripping 1947 novel about a Dutch couple hiding a Jewish perfume merchant in their home during WWII marks a welcome reintroduction to the author’s unfortunately obscure oeuvre...Beautifully nuanced and moving, Keilson’s tale probes the more concealed, subtle forces that annihilate the human spirit."

—Publishers Weekly

"[Comedy in a Minor Key’s] design is so neat, spare, and geometric that to think of it is like tapping a spoon to a crystal glass."

—Yelena Akhtiorskaya, The Forward

"A brisk, engaging work of Holocaust literature that deserves to be better known."

—Booklist

"The Death of the Adversary and Comedy in a Minor Key are masterpieces, and Hans Keilson is a genius. . . . Rarely has a finer, more closely focused lens been used to study such a broad and brutal panorama, mimetically conveying a failure to come to grips with reality by refusing to call that reality by its proper name...Rarely have such harrowing narratives been related with such wry, off-kilter humor, and in so quiet a whisper. Read these books and join me in adding him to the list, which each of us must compose on our own, of the world’s very greatest writers."

—Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)