I was fortunate to be a part of the MFA Program at the University of Guelph, where I wrote this collection as my thesis. Thank you to my classmates and teachers, especially Catherine Bush and Russell Smith. I’m greatly indebted to Betsy Warland and Wayde Compton, my mentors in Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio, and to the TWS community. I also extend my gratitude to the Canada Council for the Arts for their generous assistance, and to the editors of Grain and Prairie Fire for publishing “Warplanes” and “The Poets in the Kitchen Window,” respectively.
Love and thanks to my family: my four brothers and my sister for their everlasting faith in me; my mother for the love and the food; and my father, a poet in his own right, who once promised me he would publish my first book but passed away before he had the chance. This book is in his memory.
And finally, to Sean, ahuvi hanitzhi. I couldn’t have done any of this without you. This book is for you.
Praise
“Frank, bold, sexy, Ayelet Tsabari’s voice astonishes with its vitality. The Best Place on Earth offers stories of love and displacement set against a backdrop of military conflict, told through the lens of being young and Israeli of Middle Eastern descent. These tales feel torn from the heart.”
—CATHERINE BUSH, author of Claire’s Head and The Rules of Engagement
“The most restrictive border may be the most primary one—the distance between two human minds; between one person’s inner world and the subjective life of another. Ayelet Tsabari shows us literature’s power to cross this essential divide, and to shatter simplistic notions that tempt us when we think in cultural, regional or historical terms. This book marks the debut of a brilliant and ambitious literary voice, and Tsabari’s rich and subtle fiction gives us the world as it is—complexly multicultural, messily beautiful and painfully sublime.”
—WAYDE COMPTON, author of After Canaan
“Tsabari’s debut collection is cinematic. Her vivid descriptions and insights on the intersections of love, hope and war are thought-provoking and challenge the reader to engage with a conflicted world with a new understanding.”
—GURJINDER BASRAN, author of Everything Was Good-bye
“Stories are survival. Fiercely alert, Tsabari’s Israeli-Mizrahi-inspired stories—where nothing is a given—deserve our fierce attention. Her deft evoking of the sensate vibrancy of Israeli daily life locates us inside its very vectors of violence and intimacy. There is no turning away. Elating, wrenching, The Best Place on Earth is on the cutting edge of our literature; our deeper comprehension of global life.”
—BETSY WARLAND, author of Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing
“Tsabari’s stories pulse with raw energy.”
—NANCY RICHLER, author of The Imposter Bride
Copyright
The Best Place on Earth
Copyright © 2013 by Ayelet Tsabari.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 978-1-4434-1197-4
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
FIRST CANADIAN EDITION
The stories “The Poets in the Kitchen Window” and “Warplanes” were previously published in Prairie Fire and Grain magazine, respectively.
The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
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