Before

Eloquent, intricately woven, and dark yet ultimately redemptive, Joseph Hurka's novel is a story about humanity. How does history shape who we are and who we become? From where do monstrous acts come, and how do we maintain our own humanity in the face of them? On the eve of September 11th, 2001, the lives on one street in the city of Cambridge collide, the how's and why's of each individual defining the moment of collision. Beginning with Nazi Germany and ending with a darkened street the night before the United States is forever changed, Hurka's novel is a vaulting sweep of the history of inhumanity and the choices we face in every moment as to what kind of human beings we are and what kind of human beings we want to become. Never moralizing, always insightful and compelling, the story echoes on long after the last page has been turned.

BEFORE A review by Matt W. Miller Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University Author of Cameo Diner: Poems In BEFORE, Joseph Hurka incorporates his powerful instincts as a storyteller with a poet's meticulous attention to image, music and metaphor to craft an exquisite and haunting tale of a group of people on the night before 9/11. The narrative, which moves lightly and necessarily back and forth between time and space, pulls the reader along with great intensity. In the joy of reading the story it would be easy to miss the echoes of image and metaphor that affect the lives of these people and tethers them together between the years, countries, and cultures that separate them. The idea that we are all in some way voyeurs is demonstrated in the parallel narratives of a stalker, a photographer, and a young man looking through thousands of photos of the Holocaust in an attempt to discover the fate of his family. The recurring images of sunflowers and cicadas demonstrate that we are all connected by the natural world. From Nazi-ravaged Bohemia during WWII to bohemian Cambridge, Massachusetts on the eve of September 11, 2001 we are inserted into the lives of men and women who bear life's wounds not with hyperboles of heroics or villainy but with the basic strength and weakness that we all possess. As a writer, Hurka does not take the easy path of merely creating sympathy or pity for the humans that people his story. Like Chekhov or Carver, Hurka is able to make us feel empathy for these people by showing that these people are us. The choices they make are the ones we may have made in similar situations, after experiencing the same blows that life inflicts. Whether it is an old man recovering from a stroke and haunted by his memories of being a boy fighting Nazis to avenge his slaughtered family, a photographer finding her place in a society of slippery meaning and morality, or even a Gulf War vet who has become a midnight stalker of women, we see something of ourselves in all of them. We understand them even if we don't always condone what they do or did in their life. That we can feel all this about these people the night before Al-Qaeda terrorists will kill thousands of people of U.S. soil may even unhinge the locked doors of that day's emotions and judgments. BEFORE is exactly what the title suggests. It is the story of how everything that comes before affects what happens now and what happens later. The human capacity for deep and detailed memory, not only in our own minds but in the methods we have developed to record history, are constantly at work on the way we experience and act in the world. Like the spider's web, where if you touch one strand all other strands will feel the vibration, so is the human race. The act of one person affects the lives of others all over the world and across time. We see this now in the world where we still fight over the actions and words of people written thousands of years ago. Like all