Part novel and part memoir, Yoel Hoffmann's Moods is flooded with feelings, evoked by his family, losses, loves, the soul's hidden powers, old phone books, and life in the Galilee-with its every scent, breeze, notable dog, and odd neighbor. Carrying these shards is a general tenderness, accentuated by a new dimension brought along by "that great big pill of Prozac."

Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, Moods is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction-a small marvel of a book, and with its pockets of joy, a curiously cheerful book by an author who once compared himself to "a praying mantis inclined to melancholy."