Books

Sandman's Dust

This was a first novel that came and went in a heartbeat. Yet one friend said that it reminded him of The Circus of Dr. Lao.

After

Be prepared for a novel so outrageous and disconcerting, so funny and shocking... too serious to be madcap, too angry to be rollicking, After is a scathing, thoroughly offensive novel that hunts taboos like a heat-seeking missile.
The Oregonian

Despite the brilliant wisecracks and steely sarcasm, After is never more than a breath away from the horror of Before upon which it is predicated: genocide... An amazing book of both terror and hope.
Houston Chronicle

After forces us to to enter a world where sardonic humor and unspeakable horror perform an intricate dane over the ashes of Jewish history... A triumph of the imagination, as well as of the humane spirit.
Philadelphia Inquirer

A ferocious, animated ride through concentration camps and immediate post war Germany... the maelstrom that is After... dares to refract a delicate subject through a prism and let the images shatter into layered reflections
Chicago Tribune

A big, untidy, funny, wildly extravagant novel... wonderfully involved, deeply thoughtful... After is a brilliant investigation into the possibility of moral life after recent history.
Boston Globe

Signs and Wonders

Harrowing... An angry, difficult, and funny novel... As a novelist, [Bukiet's] habits of mind and art are distinctly European... It's heartening to see a writer willing to do precisely what most novelists won't: allow the world madness to evince itself as a kind of madness on the page. The effect is disturbing and it's meant to be.
Philadelphia Inquirer

The real thing - a daringly original millennial novel, horrific and hilarious by turns, brilliant, black and bitterly funny... Its place in the pantheon of later century cultural achievement may lie somewhere between Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and the late Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove.
Washington Post

Great promise... A luminous evocation of the bone and blood mechanics of ethereal things... An energetically meaning-laden plot, which parodies as well as honors the New Testament.
Village Voice

Signs and Wonders does not flinch from confronting images of God and pinching them in the face... He cements his place among the machers of Jewish literature.
Chicago Tribune

Ferocious... Bukiet's blend of storytelling brio and audacious imagination calls to mind such disparate maximalists as the Salman Rushdie of Midnight's Children and the Mark Helprin of Winter's Tale... Signs and Wonders is both thrilling reading and deeply intelligent commentary that dares to ask timeless questions... To have pulled off that delicate balancing act is, indeed, something of a miracle.
Salon

Signs and Wonders rads like a cross between The Dirty Dozen and the Book of Revelation. Bukiet... has bitten off more than he can chew, more I can chew, more than most anyone can chew.
Boston Globe

If [Signs and Wonders] reminds of us of Hieronymus Bosch , we are right where the author wants us to be. Bukiet is not so much writing a narrative as describing scenes in a kind of performance art allegory... Bukiet will surely be compared with Isaac Babel among the Cossacks... Bukiet is a cerebral prophet manifesting shamanistic interior visions.
San Francisco Chronicle

Strange Fire

It hadn't occurred to me in these tormented times that a novel set in Israel could make me laugh, but by the second page of this ferociously comic, rambunctious, spooky book, I was beside myself... What gives Strange Fire much of its wild charm is the author's knowledge of Israel and its unimaginably complicated tensions.
Washington Post

Corrupt, violent zigzagging atmosphere... a raucous vituperative attack on every kind of political hypocrisy.
Los Angeles Times

A stunning literary achievement.
Miami Herald

Savagely funny... Strange Fire is a strange, wonderful hybrid of a book.
Chicago Tribune

Bukiet's prose is, in fact, so beautiful that it often overshadows the complicated plot of international intrigue... And for all of the suspense, the politics and the darkness lurking in the eaves, the wisdom of this novel comes from the fact our (lame, blind, jaded. earless) guide is endowed with such wit, intelligence and humanity.
Salon

A master of the sardonic, Bukiet pays the story for both political intrigue and guilty laughter, like the black humorists he admires: Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon, and he has a better ear for the punch line than either.
Buffalo News.

Stories of an Imaginary Childhood

A writer once said that he did not have enough time to write a short story, so he wrote a novel instead. Indeed, the short story is a fiendishly difficult form to truly master. Every sentence must add to the whole, every word must be perfect. Novels can ramble on tangentially, but good short stories must be rafted. In Stories of an Imaginary Childhood Melvin Jules Bukiet proves that he is an expert at the form. His stories lift and soar, encompassing a world of truth in just a few pages. His characters have flesh and life; they stumble into completely credible situations. He draw us into his world Bukiet has no… limitations. His stories cry out to be read.
Richmond News Leader

There’s a marmoreally frozen world that the author sees as not so much a lost Eden but a Utopia foreclosed before he or his protagonist could be born to imagine it. The result is a spooky literary quality beyond elegy or sentimentality, a macabre evocation of a warm and cancelled culture whose lusty spirits… disport beyond time and the particular death that we know awaits them… The book itself is like this: a tempest, turbulent and lifelike… its distance from us and the author emphasized by the intensity of his effort to recover what is gone forever.
Chicago Tribune

At their best, many of Bukiet’s stories are reminiscent of Isaac Bashevis Singer and not just because they both situate boyish writers manques in the world of Orthodox, fervently messianic Polish Jewry. As in Singer’s work, what is often most interesting about these tales is the indirect, allegorical language used to allude to the nascent writer’s boundless creativity.
TLS

Melvin Jules Bukiet is enchanting, original and thoroughly irresistible in any disguise. Stories of an Imaginary Childhood is an extraordinary achievement, an immensely enjoyable collection of truly remarkable tales.
Miami Herald

I don’t know of any other words in English (or for that matter in any other language) that try to recreate imaginatively the lost world of European Jewry. We cannot help thinking about Proszowice as one of the hundreds of East European shtetls whose populations vanished from the face of the earth during the Second World War. This muted anticipation of a devastating future is handled throughout with the control of the true artist… It seems to me evident that Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Babel have been among Mr. Bukiet’s models, but this is not an intrusive detail; rather it inspires the informed reader to appreciate his talent, and perhaps even genius for developing a vision uniquely his own that bears comparison (favorably) with theirs… An original contribution to modern literature.
Lawrence L. Langer

While the Messiah Tarries

True story. Wearing my editor’s cap I planned to assign While the Messiah tarries to an outside reviewer - good critic, interested in Jewish fiction, especially the kind tinged with fantasy a la Isaac Bashevis Singer - when I opened the book and started to to read… The assurance of the prose, the entrancing voice of the storyteller… and above all, that feather’s touch of humor - all these were quite irresistible. But what about the plot? That too, it turned out, couldn’t be better… Normally short stories should be enjoyed slowly, taken one at bedtime or after meals, but… I kept reading Bukiet’s collection until six hours later I turned the last page… Virtually all the stories in While the Messiah Tarries are strongly Jewish in tone, theme and dramatis personae, but even agnostics will be charmed by the Bukiet magic… Their charm not withstanding, Bukiet’s tales frequently end in death, madness or religious epiphany. They leave you shaken or wonder-struck… it’s just one more sign of the ease and self-confidence that comes with true mastery.
Michael Dirda, Washington Post

While the Messiah Tarries elegantly balances real and fictional contradictions; tensions between rootedness and wandering, matter and spirit, intellect and imagination… each story a provocative puzzle.
Minneapolis Tribune

By the time Bukiet’s dazzling new collection of nine stories opens in America a generation after the Holocaust, the Messiah is still nowhere in sight. No one in While the Messiah Tarries harbors notions that this is a civilized century… A heady brew of wit, fierce moral intelligence, fabulous ear for dialogue, and unfettered imagination make this collection diabolically enjoyable.
Philadelphia Inquirer

A Faker's Dozen

A good story is a breath of fresh air; a great story is a shot of heroin. Anyone who believes that short stories differ from novels only in length has clearly never read a great one. One way to rectify this would be to read A Faker’s Dozen, a collection of 11 gems by Melvin Jules Bukiet. In this, his third short story collection, Bukiet slowly lures the reader into his fictional world, starting near the shadowy border between the real and the ludicrous, and then moving firmly into the fantastical by way of the sinister.
Jerusalem Post

After one reads Bukiet’s story “But, Microsoft! What Bye through Yonder Windows Breaks?” it’s entirely possible that Bill Gates may never again be viewed in quite the same light... Just one of 11 (not 12, not 13) short stories in Bukiet’s cleverly compiled and titled collection, it ponders the classic issues of truth versus lies, perception versus reality, that have occupied writers for centuries. Indeed, many of Bukiet’s stories feature writers, either as narrators or protagonists, who discover and distort the truth in all its many guises. From a philandering author in “Tongue of the Jews” to the Nabokov-obsessed scribe in “Squeak, Memory,” the relationship between those who chronicle life’s vagaries and those who orchestrate them becomes tantalizingly blurred as pain gives way to pathos, delight transcends despair - and visa versa. Irresistibly... intelligently fanciful, Bukiet’s stories entertain with starting intuition.
American Library Association

Undertown

Adult author Bukiet makes the leap to children’s books with this off-kilter tale of two suburban youths who end up in the neverending, occasionally uncharted sewers of new York City. Timothy Murphy and Jessamyn Hazard barely knew each other back home in Montclair, N.J, until their parents starting dating, but when a freak accident launches them and Timothy’s sailboat, the X-tra Large, into the sewers they see an opportunity for excitement and adventure. As the two middle-schoolers elude the authorities, they encounter a talented graffiti artist, an identity-challenged homeless man, and a bizarre gang of subterranean thieves. It’s a coming-of-age escapade with a sense of wonder, and Bukiet pays homage to the history and mysteries of N.Y.C. with a writing style that’s part sentimental, part poetic, and part tongue-in-cheek. Throughout, Bukiet’s language and phrasings show a respect for and confidence in his audience, and... make for memorably entertaining protagonists, lost in a not-so-impossible world.
Publisher’s Weekly

This classic hero’s journey is set against the detailed backdrop of New York City, both above ground and below…[Timothy and Jessamyn] end up sliding beneath Manhattan into the vast New York sewer system [and} must hang on for the ride of their lives. Navigating their small boat - called, naturally, the X-tra Large - they encounter giant rats, eccentric underground dwellers (such as a graffiti artist named DUO and the deceptively small yet dangerous Malomi) and their own fears. Bukiet’s first children’s outing veers between language carefully designed to appeal to its intended audience and occasionally sophisticated sentence structure and subjects that should engage far older readers. Dramatic and imaginative.
Booklist

Neurotica

Quite wonderful.
Bookforum

Nothing Makes You Free

These narratives of extreme suffering and lamentation deserve our closest attention. A great evil caused them to be written, but they are good to read. They bring us the inescapable truth: there are wounds that time can never heal, and crimes that it would be death to forget.
Sigrid Nunez

Not solely about Jews, but about what people have lived and have lived through and what they have learned about the burdens of the world, whether or not they have ever wanted to know a single damn thing about them.
Stanley Crouch

An important book
Booklist

Wrenching
Library Journal

Scribblers on the Roof

Naked Came the Post-postmodernist

Runts

(with Finnegan Shepard)
Debuted at the New York Theater Festival