Angel Max

by Peter Glassgold

As a young child in polygolt Kovno, Max Petrovich Kraft had a clear vision of his own future and the wonderful adventures he was going to have in America. America! Where everyone spoke English, so... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151002207
• ISBN13: 9780151002207
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 464 Pages
• Weight: 1.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

A powerful and original novel.

The Angel Max is a truly original novel, written in a prose that is at once detached and cool, intelligent and compassionate, sensitive and perceptive. Much of the power of the novel comes from the tone of this prose, but the story itself is powerful as well. It's one of the best novels I've read in recent years.

Also a great literary novel

Besides being an engrossing historical novel, The Angel Max features some of the most finely crafted prose you'll find anywhere, as well as a narrator (Max himself) whose internal conflicts provide a fascinating and singular point of view, a combination the Times review calls "airless", but which I found gave the novel the extra quality that makes it far more than the usual historical novel. This one's also for people looking for great literature.

A great read about a facinating era in America

The Angel Max is a wonderfully written novel about an immigrant from Russia (Lithuania) who arrives in New York in the 1880's. What unfolds in this book is a solidly researched history of immigration, anarchism in America, and the City of New York. The way the story folds factual material into the fictional lives of Max and Fanny Kraft is interesting and fun to read and ponder. There is gentle humor, along with anxiety and sadness in this family, as there is in life for all of us. The book concludes in 1919, an important "threshold" year in American history. This is a great read---go get it today! Peter Glassgold is one terrific writer!