My Works
Be Wary of the Elderly
The energy and imagination of these poems is stunning, crammed full as they are with everything from aardvarks to dead friends, mothers and nightly suffering on the news, and the bittersweet price of growing older. They keep running, running, towards and away from God, like prayers uttered under one's breath in a marathon, and the effect overall is beatific, as they offer to us the welcome consolation of poetry.
–Phillip Lopate, author of A Year and a Day and A Mother's Tale
Poignant, wistful, witty, in love with language play, and with the formal beauty of rhyming, Allan Appel invites the reader into enigmatic and paradoxical realms. With a dramatist's gift running through his lines, and with the disturbance of normal prose syntax, he liberates his poems to make their meaning of pain, hunger, impoverishment and yearning.
–Marc Kaminsky, author of The Stones of Lifta
In his new poetry collection, Be Wary of the Elderly, Allan Appel takes on big themes – death, old age, plague, the Holocaust – but always with an eye to the personal. His large subjects are made meaningful to the reader because they are made concrete and palpable. Honed to an ironic edge, sometimes outright funny, but always with deep empathy, these poems reveal the tragedy of the human condition at its most grandiose and also at its most mundane.
–Judith Liebmann, author of Ekphrasis, and Poet Laureate of Branford, CT
Be Wary of the Elderly offers dark and sardonic portraits of complex family history and dynamics, the pandemic, being husband, parent, grandparent . . . Aging and mortality make frequent appearances hovering over a collection of mordant yet whimsical wit. 'Superhero Sonnet" will shake any sentient reader to the core!
–Melanie Greenhouse, author of Republic of Sunlight
The Hebrew Tutor of Bel Air
This fictional story is about a young tutor hired to prepare a bat mitzvah. The story takes place in 1963 Los Angeles and revolves around the protagonist, Norman Plummer, who finds himself in a wealthy, unfamiliar world.
Club Revelation
In this adroit mix of comedy and theology, three interfaith Jewish/Christian couples who share ownership of a brownstone unwittingly rent the ground floor to a charming, young Southern evangelist. Serving up his own blend of Christian cuisine, he opens a restaurant in the space, hoping to convert the Jews of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. His scheme threatens to destroy the harmony of the building when one of his six landlords finds comfort--and much more--in the preacher’s conversion-by-gastronomy methods.
High Holiday Sutra
“American Jews have been mixing Buddhist saffron with Jewish matzoballs for over three decades now, but not until Allan Appel’s rabbi in High Holiday Sutra have we seen the perfect result. High Holiday Sutra is emotionally Jewish, philosophically Buddhist, and esthetically American. Om Shalom.”
The Sacrifice of Isaacson & Soul Catchers
The first novel, a dark comedy on the binding of Isaac, the Israeli-Palestinian struggle, jogging, and the presence of angels on American college campuses, is now being offered to publishers.
Soul Catchers features two brothers, one a Jewish seminary drop out and the other a Mormon in-training meeting in 1960s L.A., where they fight, with the assitance of beautiful angels, over the fate of their deceased gambling dad's soul