I fell in love with Emma Eckstein the moment I saw her from the fourth gallery of the Carl Theater, and this was also the night I met Sigmund Freud." So goes the life, times, and loves of Dr. Jakob Sammelsohn, a fairly incurable romantic venturing optimistically through modern history. In this inventive and satiric tour de force, Joseph Skibell, award-winning author of A Blessing on the Moon, presents a picaresque novel of exile that could spring only from the imagination of a virtuoso. Possessing "a gifted, committed imagination" (New York Times), Joseph Skibell is the author of three novels, A Blessing on the Moon, The English Disease, and A Curable Romantic; the forthcoming collection of nonfiction stories My Father's Guitar and Other Imaginary Things; and another forthcoming nonfiction work, Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud. He has received numerous awards, including the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Sami Rohr Award in Jewish Literature, Story magazine's Short Short-Story Prize, and the Turner Prize for First Fiction.
As director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature from 2008 to 2015, he sang and played guitar onstage with both Margaret Atwood and Paul Simon. A professor at Emory University, Skibell has also taught at the University of Wisconsin and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. Recently a Senior Fellow at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, he is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities at Emory University. A native Texan, he lives mostly in his head. "An irresistible romp about a lovelorn 19th-Century doctor who falls in with Sigmund Freud--and some dangerously attractive women." --O Magazine
"A Curable Romantic has no end of fun with its themes, notably the limits and usefulness of language . . . At the same time, it's a tale of great compassion and reverence-a remarkable, deeply felt examination of man's relationship to an ever-changing world."
-The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"A high-energy, wild performance . . . The postmodern Jewish novel as mash-up of genres: Yiddish folktale, sentimental education, Freudian case history, erotic confession, utopian parable, all wrapped up in an 'alternative history' of Jewish emancipation."
-The New Republic
