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“…an American talent…”—Stephen King Pollack writes about times of tragedy and transition insightfully, aware of their everyday quality and of their gravity. In the Mouth is a window onto the amazing tenderness and irrationality of human life. One story, “The Bris,” has been selected for The Best American Short-Stories 2008 (Edited by Stephen King and Heidi Pitlor). “Eileen Pollock writes with great acuity, humor, and intelligent resign-ation about the various ways family love is called upon and revealed. This book is terrific company.”—Lorrie Moore “These are funny, rueful, wise stories, steeped in absurdity, pain, possibility —the work of a writer who has lived.”—Gish Jen

We first meet Lucy Appelbaum, the heroine of Paradise, New York, n 1970, when she is a nine year old girl enjoying her family's Catskills hotel, the Garden of Eden. Ten years later, having found nothing else at which she can distinguish herself, she  tries to save the Eden by capitalizing on a wave of nostalgia for the Borscht Belt, running the hotel as a sort of living museum of Yiddish culture.

In the course of that season, Lucy comes to realize her love for the hotel's black handyman, Mr. Jefferson -- and  the difficulties she faces in overcoming the barriers between them. She battles her grandmother's not-so-subtle attempts to sabotage her success, her parents' superstitious fear of anything that attracts attention to the Jews, and her brother's contention that what Lucy is doing is more a matter of ego than authentic religious feeling.

On top of all this, Lucy must contend with the Hasid who buys the chicken farm next door, a cell of ancient Jewish Communist who foment a strike among Eden's overworked young staff, and a gay chef and a gay baker who want to prove to the world that kosher cuisine can satisfy the most sophisticated gourmet.

Among the novel's characters are Shirley and Nat Feidel, who barely survived the Holocaust but refuse to allow bitterness to rule their lives; Mami Goshgarian, the Eden's tumeler; and Jimmy Kilcoin, and Irish Catholic insurance adjustor who has earned a reputation as "the Don Juan of the Catskills" and is determined to seduce Lucy before summer's end.

When Ketzel Weinrach’s beloved brother Potsie goes missing in Las Vegas, she not only must try to find him, she must confront her family’s shady history and their ties to the legendary Jewish mob, Murder, Inc., as well as her troubling relationship to her cousin Perry (who runs a strip club on the outskirts of Vegas), her long and apparently not-so-loving marriage to her recently departed husband Morty Tittelman (a self-styled professor of dirty jokes and erotic folklore), and her own failed career as a stand-up comic.