Amos Oz Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Amos OZ is a bestselling literary fiction author from Israel that has been writing since 1966.

The author was born to a family of teachers and scholars in 1939 and has said some of his family were militant Zionists who came to Israel from Poland and Russia in the early 1930s.

As a fifteen-year-old in 1954, Amos Oz became a rebellious teenager and left Jerusalem, to work and live a the Hulda Kibbutz. It was at the kibbutz that he would finally complete his high school education.

After graduating from high school, he did his Army service leaving in 1961 before going back to the kibbutz to work in the cotton fields. During his early twenties, he published some of his works in “Keshet” the literary quarterly.

His kibbutz would then send him to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to study literature and philosophy. Armed with his bachelor’s degree, he went back to the Hulda Kibbutz where he spent time teaching at the local high school, farming, and writing for more than twenty-five years.
When the war broke out in 1967, he was a reserve soldier that fought in a tank unit during the “Six-Day War.” Six years later, he fought in the “Yom Kippur War” but on the opposite side in the Golan Heights.

In 1970, Amos Oz worked at St, Cross Colege, Oxford as a visiting fellow. In 1975, he went back to Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, where he worked as Author in Residence.

In 1984, he moved to the United States as a resident at Colorado Springs College, where he lived with his wife and child.

A year later, he decided to quit the Kibbutz and moved to Arad, where his son would benefit from the dry desert climate as a sufferer of asthma.

The author would dedicate much of his time to teaching and writing and by the time of his death, he would have attained the rank of full professor at the Beer Sheva-based Ben Gurion University.
Following the war in 1967, he published numerous essays and articles about the Arab/Israeli conflict, as he campaigned for a compromise based on a two-state solution.

He would turn out to be one of the foremost political activists in Israel as his articles and speeches were published and translated across the globe.

In addition to his writing, he was also one of the editors of Stories from the Kibbutz an anthology of short stories. He also edited a collection of short interviews with Israeli soldiers telling their stories of the Six-Day War.

During the 1960s, Oz was one of the most prominent figures of the New Wave literary movement. This was a movement that had prominent people such as Aharon Appelfield and A.B. Yehoshua.

Over the years Oz published more than 14 novels, a dozen books of essays and articles, several children’s books, and novellas. He is also the author of more than 450 essays and articles and his articles have been translated into nearly 50 world languages.
“A Tale of Love and Darkness” was the first work written in Hebrew to be translated and be part of a selection of Chinese textbooks.

The author’s literary criticism and political commentary have also been published in newspapers such as “Yedioth Ahronoth” and “Davar.”

The Ben Gurion University which is his alma mater also keeps an archive of his works. “The New York Review of Books” has at times published translations of his essays.

Amos Oz’s work “A Tale of Love and Darkness” is an utterly honest, comic, and tragic tale that is the self-portrait of the author who lived in turbulent times and also a family saga.

Amos writes of the emotional difficulties he had to live with as Israel was reborn in 1948 in the midst of ethnic displacement, gunfire, and tension.

To make it worse, he is living in a dysfunctional family, with an emotionally distant and intellectual father and a mentally unstable mother.

In time, Amoz Oz fled home and for three decades, he lived in a Kibbutz, which shaped much of his adult experiences.

After the emigration of his parents to Palestine from Ukraine and Poland, they had very different lives, which informed the dysfunctional nature of their family.

It was a time of deep antisemitism in the Middle East and soon, even Oz acknowledged that there were enemies everywhere, including among the Israeli mobs he called his people.

Ultimately, it is the story of Oz as he left his family full of failed businessmen, scholars, and dreamers to become part of a Kibbutz, where he changed his name, married, and had his own children.

“Judas” by Amos Oz is a work that shines a light on the religion, conflicts, and great questions of the Middle East. It is a novel and bold interpretation of events in the context of a delicate and harrowing love story.
The work is set in 1959, where Shmuel Ash a young man sees his entire world falling apart. He is forced to drop out of college when his parent go bankrupt and his girlfriend dumps him.

At this point in his life, he is lucky enough to find work and shelter in Jerusalem. It is here that he starts conversing and keeping the company of an invalid and often sarcastic old man.

Soon after, Atalia a very attractive woman comes to work with the same organization and warns Shmuel not to make any advances toward her. She tells him that things will turn hairy if he falls in love with her.
They soon develop a routine, even as Shmule always feels some agitation that results from the curiosity and desire that Atalia provokes.

Later on, he starts researching how Jews perceive Jesus and also looks into the cursed and mysterious figure of Judas, who has been caricatured as the epitome of pettiness and treachery.

“Black Box” by Amos Oz is the story of an Israeli couple Alec and Ilana whose marriage is full of hatred, passion, and love.

Ilana got married to Alec at 28 at a time when he was not interested in marriage but was forced to do so by his domineering father. Ilana was too young for marriage even though she had a lot of love and desire for Alec.
But she starts feeling abandoned since Alec is married to Zionist ideology and his military career. To get his attention, she cheats on him which is where things start going horribly wrong.

They soon divorce in a hateful and ugly procedure and her husband leaves the country leaving Ilana to raise Baz all on her own until she gets remarried to Michael.

Ultimately, this is an epistolary work told through a series of notes, memos, and letters between the two formerly married people, Boaz their son, Somo the new husband, Ilana’s sister, and Alec’s lawyer.