SHHH, edited and with an introduction by Davis Schneiderman, tells the incredible story of Raymond Federman's escape from the round-up of French Jews in Paris in 1942, during the Holocaust. As French police came up the stairs to the family s apartment, Federman's mother said, 'Shhh,' and pushed the then-14 year-old boy into a closet. The other members of his family, his father, mother, and two sisters, perished in Auschwitz. But no story by Federman has ever been simply told, and SHHH is no exception. Defying conventions of both the memoir and the novel, Federman tells stories of his childhood that may or may not be true, but can never simply be called false, either. The result is a complex and masterful work by a writer whose final works may be his best - an author who, while too avant-garde for the tastes of American publishers, is considered a major writer in Germany, France, and elsewhere in the world, and has had a small but dedicated following in the US for more than three decades.

About the Author:

Raymond Federman (1928-2009) was one of the most significant fiction writers of recent generations. Federman emigrated to the US in 1947 following the deaths of his mother, father, and two sisters in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. His early experiences in the US included being a American paratrooper in Korea, a saxophone player in Detroit, and a dishwasher and student in Columbia University, before earning a PhD at UCLA and becoming one of the first American critical promoters of the work of Samuel Beckett. Federman taught literature and creative writing at SUNY-Buffalo for 35 years. His numerous experience, exploits, and linguistic inventions have become the basis for nearly than thirty books of fiction, poetry, and criticism, translated into German, Italian, French, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Rumanian, Hebrew, Dutch, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, and Swahili. Federman has also been the recipient of numerous awards in the US and abroad, including the American Book Award for Smiles on Washington Square. An important theorist of contemporary writing, Federman always insisted on the integration and inseparability of memory and imagination, fact and fiction. "I have to still believe," he once said in an interview, "as I often do, that one of these days around a street corner I'm going to meet my sisters."