for fiction and the Sami Rohr Choice Prize, Torday’s stories and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and n+1, and have been honored by the Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays series. Torday is a Professor of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College.
Torday applied the Page 69 Test to The 12th Commandment and reported the following:
From page 69:Visit Daniel Torday's website.On seeing the green of Upstate New York out the window of their U-Haul once we hit the interstate with Osman between us, Yael just stares outside.: I perceive what I see in her as excitement, but whether in that moment it's excitement or dread, it will eventually turn to fear. Repulsion. Repulsing. A taking-away. An addition of absence. The first months of August in Central Ohio brutal as prophecy predicted::This is the beginning of the 69th page of the novel, which finds us deep in one of the longest excerpts from the prison journals of Natan of Flatbush, self-proclaimed prophet of his own group of outwardly Islamic, secretly Jewish mystics called the Donme. The rest of the page follows them in their move from a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, to their new rural enclave in Ohio. One note on Natan's voice-- he uses a punctuation system borrowed from early version of the Talmud, where instead of just periods and commas, there were :: and .: punctuations to delineate different length pauses.
There are lots of voices in this book! And they shift based on tenses: past, present and future. The main character, Zeke, finds his way into the Donme community as a reporter, and eventually, more, and most of the main narration comes through him. But we also learn a lot of the backstory of the book through Natan's journals. So we really only get a third of a sense of how the book sounds from this page. Which is weirdly enticing, I think.
--Marshal Zeringue
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