Books

Praise forThe Jump Artist

"This elegantly-written tribute makes as beautiful a use of the darkness and light of one man's life, as a Halsman photograph of a pretty young woman." —GQ

"A remarkable work." —Harper's Magazine

"Ratner knows how to use rhythms and metaphors to evoke a sensory, psychologically grounded reality that writers with vastly more experience than him would envy."—The Jewish Daily Forward

“Fortunately, in Ratner’s hands, all this material is transmuted into engaging fiction, not pedantic reportage. The novel’s protagonist feels like a thoughtful presence; we understand the historical material through Philipp’s perspective, which is well measured, complicated, convincingly dark.” —The Rumpus.net

"Ratner. . . vividly depicts his character’s ordeal and amazing recovery from the trauma of the event." —The Morning News

"Ratner uses a historical figure to discuss the trepidations felt throughout a Europe aware that the future was unknowable yet around the corner. It is this confusion, on an individual and collective level, that allows the novel to transcend the bounds of historical fiction. Ratner describes the era well, but his more substantial achievement is in the creation of a character that history already knows." —Booklist

"Ratner weaves a psychologically arresting fiction from these facts, imagining the creep of Nazism in 1928 Europe." —Cleveland Plain Dealer

"The book is a beautiful, if dark, psychological portrait of a man suffering under the weight of his own doubts, as well as the world events that have deeply personal consequences for him." —Cedar Rapids Gazette

"Ratner’s brilliant first novel . . . presents a fascinating tribute to the “jump artist” through the prism of a dark and horrific time in European history." —Cleveland Jewish News

“After reading The Jump Artist, I was overwhelmed by Austin’s talent as a novelist ...[he] has written a compelling, must-read book whose subject matter has universal appeal, especially in these troubling times.” —Deedra Dolin, The Mandel JCC Festival of Jewish Books & Authors

“A beautifully scrupulous, intricately detailed novel about joy and despair, anti-Semitism and assimilation, and like a great photograph, it seems to miss nothing, and to catch its subject in all his complexity.”—Charles Baxter author of The Feast of Love and The Soul Thief

The Jump Artist

by Austin Ratner

Price: $14.95

Paperback
13-digit ISBN: 978-1-934137-15-4

*Named one of ten promising debuts of 2009 by Publishers Weekly*

Click here to read a Haaretz interview with Austin Ratner

The Jump Artist is evocative psychological fiction based on the true, and largely unknown, story of renowned photographer Philippe Halsman, a man Adolph Hitler knew by name, who Sigmund Freud wrote about in 1931, and who put Marilyn Monroe on the cover of Life magazine. Surviving an episode that presages the horrors of WWII, Halsman transforms himself from a victim of rampant anti-Semitism into a purveyor of the marvelous.

The story begins in September 1928, when Halsman and his father were hiking in the Tyrolean Alps. While Halsman went ahead on the trail, his father was attacked and murdered. The Jewish 22 year old from Latvia found himself alone in hostile territory; Nazism was on the rise and Innsbruck’s foremost forensic pathologist, Karl Meixner, saw to it that Halsman would be tried for killing his father. It was a miscarriage of justice that foreshadowed the many horrors to come in Austria, and though the events are now lost in the shadow of the Holocaust, they were then known across Europe as ‘The Austrian Dreyfus Affair.’ Many intellectuals, including Albert Einstein, came to Halsman’s aid in a public battle that pitted reason against irrational prejudice.

Austin Ratner's short fiction has appeared in numerous literary magazines. He was awarded the Missouri Review Editors' Prize in Fiction and a fellowship to study at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Before turning to writing he received his M.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. This is his first novel.

Publication date: May 2009 / 256 pages / Trim size: 5.5" x 8.25"