Hunting in America

Praise for Hunting in America:

“With restrained and beau­ti­ful prose, Haki­mi spins an intox­i­cat­ing­ly strange tale about an Israeli woman relo­cat­ing to Amer­i­ca, learn­ing to hunt, and pos­si­bly los­ing her grasp on reality. . . . Through her care­ful sto­ry­telling, Haki­mi deft­ly weaves in com­plex themes of alien­ation, per­spec­tive, desire, dis­con­nec­tion, and the nor­mal­iza­tion of violence. . . . Each time the nar­ra­tor grabs her rifle, Haki­mi skill­ful­ly nar­rows the novel’s focus and increas­es the sus­pense, all the way to the end.”
—Anna Stol­ley Persky, Jewish Book Council

“A fable becoming reality of a woman becoming herself: Tehila Hakimi’s Hunting in America just purely bangs.”
—Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus

“A study in cultural absorption: how violence enters the body and rewires the mind. . . . The rifles gleam and the deer bleed, but Hunting in America is a workplace novel at heart. . . . The language of the hunt bleeds easily into the language of productivity: targets, headcounts, eliminations. Joanna Chen’s translation preserves these cold-blooded cadences. . . . The recoil of the past two years rattles through its silences, its evasions and deferrals, its blind spots and cruelties. There is a shot the woman takes – alone, in the snow – that has ugly consequences. The question that haunts her is whether she meant to take it. That same irresolvable question haunts this novel.”
—Beejay Silcox, Times Literary Supplement

“Hakimi’s restrained, hyper-focused style makes for compelling, propulsive reading. The short chapters ensure the narrative never drags, and the novel’s ambiguous ending adds to the tale a genuine level of horror.”
—Haddasah Magazine

“Hunting in America is a haunting meditation on displacement and violence. Hakimi leaves readers unsettled, raising questions rather than resolving them. This is a short, striking novel that lingers like a wound that refuses to heal.”
—Haaretz

“Hakimi refrains from analysis or heavy-handed explanations, relaying the narrator’s psychic state through succinct but telling descriptions. Joanna Chen’s superb translation of Hakimi’s prose captures both the feel and tone of corporate America as well as the psychic disruption that the narrator experiences. . . . With its themes of relocation and unstable identities, Hunting in America is very much a twenty-first-century novel, a tale that rewards patient reading and an ear for what is powerfully expressed between the lines.”
—World Literature Today

“Hunting in America is chilling and thought provoking. Tehila Hakimi is a skillful hunter.”
—Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, author of Waking Lions

“This novel exhales a kind of danger. It crackles with tension. Hunting in America is an uncanny, unnerving read. I held my breath to the last brilliant page.”
—Bea Setton, author of Berlin

“An enigmatic puzzle of a novel with a wry, mesmerizing voice. . . . You can’t stop turning the pages. . . . It evokes Samantha Schweblin and Han Kang in its surreality and daring specificity. Pervasively unsettling, both too alien and too familiar, Hunting in America coolly illustrates the complicity that both Israeli and Americans have in a gun-toting culture, and the insidious ways that violence can seep into our consciousness.”
—Lit Hub’s “22 Novels You Need to Read This Summer”

“Sexy, witty, and spare, like an unexpected stranger with whom you might be persuaded to leave a party. Except the party’s in middle America and involves guns.”
—Elisa Albert, author of Human Blues and The Snarling Girl and Other Essays

“Provocative. . . . Told differently, the novel could be a classic noir, but Hakimi keeps the reader on their toes with the narrative’s disarming obliqueness and ambiguity, all the way to the final crack of a gunshot. This tantalizes.”
—Publishers Weekly

“In this astonishing debut novel, Tehila Hakimi weaves a darkly seductive tale of alienation and desire and asks hard questions about the sacrifices made and challenges faced by women in a male dominated workplace, revealing the violence inherent in our daily lives. Hakimi’s protagonist straddles the thin line between reality and fantasy, between cultures and languages, between hunting and being hunted. Utterly gripping and chilling in its razor-sharp precision, Hunting in America will leave you breathless.”
—Ayelet Tsabari, author of The Art of Leaving and Songs for the Brokenhearted

“If you’re looking for a haunting, engrossing and sensual read, might I suggest this book?”
—Kvellor

“A debut that stuns with originality and guile, Tehila Hakimi skillfully weaves a narrative that explores womanhood, the workplace, and the unsettling normalization of violence in both Israel and America. I was caught in the spell of the narrator’s obscure voice from the first paragraph.”
—Dorit Rabinyan, author of All the Rivers

“Reading Tehila Hakimi’s stunning debut is a propulsive experience. My eyes moved seamlessly and fluidly across the blocks of text, going deeper into the narrator’s experience of being a newcomer in a strange yet familiar land. One of her new American colleagues teaches her to smile to appear more friendly while another instructs her how to kill a deer safely. And yet, as a reader, I wasn’t smiling and I certainly never felt safe. Like one of the bullets shot from the narrator’s rifle, Hunting in America whistles, soars, and eventually collides into a thrilling conclusion.״
—Amelia Morris, author of Wild Cat

“Slim, serious, and searching, Hunting in America revolves around some major topics right now: the experience of our inter-country relations, gun usage in our country, and the vacuous void at the center of one’s quest for power and meaning in America.”
—Julia Hass, Lit Hub’s “Most Anticipated Books of 2025”

“In the company, who is the prey? An extraordinary novel.”
—Amélie Nothomb, author of Fear and Trembling

“Hunting in America is an enigmatic novel, which I read in a few hours, but lingered in my mind long after the final page.”
—Dror Mishani, author of The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything