Apikoros Sleuth is a murder mystery in the form of a Talmudic inquiry, a rigorous and relentless pursuit of truth and justice in the full knowledge of the impossibility of ever entirely attaining the goal. In search of the possibility of an aesthetic response to the limits of representations, resisting categories, including that of the book itself, Apikoros Sleuth re-examines the practice of writing and the writer's relationship to language. The result is a palimpsest of the most ancient text of the Kabbalah and the final tractate of the Jewish Talmud, which asks the question How should we act?

Robert Majzels, author of Apikoros Sleuth and City of Forgetting (Mercury), is a Montreal-born prose writer, playwright, translator and teacher; his first novel, Hellman’s Scrapbook (Cormorant), was hailed and acclaimed. His play This Night the Kapo won first prize in the Dorothy Silver Competition and the Canadian Jewish Playwriting Competition. In 1991, his fiction was featured in Coming Attractions (Oberon); his translations include Anne Dandurand’s Small Souls Under Siege (Cormorant) and The Waiting Room (The Mercury Press), and France Daigle’s 1953 (House of Anansi). He has also translated several novels by France Daigle, short stories by Anne Dandurand and, with Erin Mouré, two books of poetry by Nicole Brossard. Robert Majzels lives in Quebec.

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