Mrs. Lilienblum's Cloud Factory

A comic novel for fans of Adelle Waldman about a tech startup that turns sand into rain clouds from Sami Rohr prize winner Iddo Gefen. Our story opens with Mrs. Lilienblum discovered drinking a martini in a crater in the Israeli desert. Eli, her adult son, tries to understand what happened to his wacky mother, while he also tackles the legend of a missing hiker named McMurphy, and whether he might be in love with Tamara, a visitor to his family's hostel on the edge of a crater. The story races forward as the Lilienblum family builds a company around Eli's mother's invention and makes comedy out of startup culture, the obsession with company valuation and funding, the secrets families keep, romantic and family love-all with humor, warmth and compassion.

Iddo Gefen is an author and a Ph.D. student in cognitive neuroscience at Columbia University, currently based in New York City. His research explores the intricate relationship between narrative understanding, human memory, and decision-making. Gefen's debut short story collection, Jerusalem Beach, won the 2023 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. One of the stories from the book is currently being adapted into a film by Ryan Gosling's production company. Translator Bio: Born in Israel in 1983, Daniella Zamir is a literary translator of contemporary Israeli fiction. She obtained her bachelor's degree in literature from Tel Aviv University, and her master's degree in creative writing from City University in London. She currently lives in Tel Aviv with her husband and daughter.