The Israeli writer Orly Castel-Bloom was born in 1960 to French-speaking Jewish Egyptian parents. She lives in the city of her birth, Tel-Aviv, with her two children. Since 1987, she has written ten books, including four novels. Castel-Bloom is a prominent Israeli woman author and in 1999 was described by a leading Israeli newspaper as one of the most influential women in Israel. She has received numerous prizes (the 1990 Tel-Aviv Prize; the 1993 Alterman prize; the 1994 and the 2001 Prime Minister’s Prize). Her novel Dolly City was included in the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works.

Castel-Bloom is among the leaders of the poetic generation which burst onto the Israeli scene in the 1980s and 1990s. 1 She has adopted the “new style” of contemporary Hebrew literature, characterized as striving towards a disintegration of a coherent world-view through a series of rhetorical devices which include shifting from an authoritative to an unauthoritative and unreliable narrator; using “slim” language, with a deliberately narrow vocabulary, a colloquial style and basic grammar;“flattening” the psychological and emotional complexity of the characters; dissolving borders between self and world and between the private body and its environs; relinquishing a clear and linear plot, and creating implausibility in the description of the fictional world. 2 Her version of the “new style” produces an extreme poetics, which radically violates any harmony, unity and value, and provocatively raises social and political questions by building controversial relationships between the physical and the political. She impairs the world she builds and severely harms the human body in an act of terror, in parallel to the political situation. Since the borders between the self and the world are unclear, the political aggression defuses into the