I Pity the Poor Immigrant: A Novel - Softcover

Zachary Lazar's previous novel, Sway (LB, 978-0-316-11309-0, 1/08), was chosen as a Best Book of 2008 by the Los Angeles Times, and his memoir, Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder (LB, 978-0-316-03768-6, 11/09), was named a Best Book of 2009 in the Chicago Tribune. Lazar is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. He lives in New Orleans, where he is on the creative writing faculty at Tulane University.

A New York Times Notable Book of 2014

"Lazar concocts a beautifully written hybrid text of remembrance, essay, speculation, and poetic prose.... Unforgettable."--Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal

"I Pity the Poor Immigrant...offers confident testimony that the novel, even in the age of memoir, has its own irreplaceable role."--Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine

"Lazar is a master of combining disparate stories into one complicated revealing narrative. In this novel, he has again succeeded in taking the reader through various seemingly unconnected lives and demonstrating how we are all immigrants striving for some inexplicable dream."--Library Journal (starred review)

"I Pity the Poor Immigrant is work of intricate and precise mystery, a book that is like a bold monument in an empty desert, a thing built of dread, and silences, and dazzling elegance, by a worldly and masterful hand."-Rachel Kushner, author of 2013 National Book Award finalist The Flamethrowers
"I Pity the Poor Immigrant conveys on every page a radical intensity of emotion and intellect. It's epic in scope and yet, in bursts of fine flinty prose, of great economy. Plus it has gangsters in it, and murder, and old lovers, and, above all, a father and daughter whose story turns out to be a heartbreaker."-Joshua Ferris, author of The Unnamed
"Here's a truly exciting novel. The conception is bold, the execution mesmerizing. Zachary Lazar makes the old stories dangerous and urgent again, and reveals the terror beneath our tidy versions of the now."-Sam Lipsyte, author of Home Land and The Ask
"Zachary Lazar's brilliant I Pity the Poor Immigrant considers Jewish identity in the provocative and riddling way that Walter Abish's How German Is It asked a similar question about Germans-but Lazar's is an even more daring project, for Jews have seldom been willing to look at themselves as perpetrators. Here Lazar deploys once again that signature mixture of panorama, poetry, and intimate observation that he invented, in his novel Sway, to evoke the chaotic, hypnotic world of sixties rock 'n' roll. In I Pity the Poor Immigrant, the maze of interlocking voices, bloody crime scenes, and rubble-strewn, blighted cityscapes from the West Bank to the Lower East Side, suggests a disturbing question: How Jewish is violence? Lazar never exactly answers: rather, he mesmerizes the reader with a somber, ever moving, kaleidoscopic demonstration: the will to violence, as a strategy as well as a defense, an ambition as well as a compensation, has been with us from the beginning, from King David to Meyer Lansky, from ancient Israel to Las Vegas, New York and Tel Aviv. These are aspects of "the poor immigrant" experience that respectably fixed later generations prefer to forget: how some of the first to arrive-however impeccable their excuses-looked about them and took the violent opportunity, used the weak and the greedy to force their way up, sometimes to the top. And yet, as it catches him in its strange, flickering, unstable narrative light, I Pity the Poor Immigrant somehow generates authentic-if bitter-pity even for a gangster like Lansky, stranded in his habit of silence when the State of Israel refuses to take him in."―Jaimy Gordon, author of Lord of Misrule, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for fiction

"Hannah Groff's story includes gangster Meyer Lansky-a major figure in the development of Las Vegas-and makes room for the Biblical King David. And in Lazar's deft narrative, the lives of those tough Jewish men are convincingly woven into a rich cast of imagined characters."―Chris Waddington, NOLA.com

"I Pity the Poor Immigrant is an inventive, taut, and refreshing take on a crime novel."―Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins, in The Rumpus