"Five Legs" Recommendations and Reviews read more

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Yaron Fried, Literature & Culture Supplement, Maariv, September 25, 2020

"A book that is an objet d'art in every way, a rich and challenging exhibition for an audience of one… Five Legs is a wondrous and one-time creation – not exactly a graphic novella, not really an Artist's Book, but perhaps a 'polygraphic novel,' ..... It is definitely worthwhile to undergo this particular investigation, in which the reader is both investigator and interrogee."

Riky Cohen, Online Literary Supplement, Ha-Mussach, September 9, 2020

"Something mysterious and unusual happens within the consciousness and in the body when reading Five Legs… Ben-Alon, familiar to the contemporary art lovers for her minimalist drawings, wrote a story (edited by Shoham Smith) that cannot be categorized as a familiar genre in the literary domain or as an "Artist's Book." This is illuminated prose, written in Ben-Alon's inimitable style which seems as though it is a written version of her drawings: condensed, interrupted, one that creates an emotional affect with the absences and holes within it… The dismantling which lies at the foundation of the story, a biographical dismantling which leads to a fundamental identity crisis, and the attempt to rebuild, with the gaping spaces, is the total experience of this book, which shook me up."

Zohara Ron, Literature & Culture Supplement, Globes, October 10, 2020

"There are books for which it is worthwhile to make a bit of an effort, and this is one of those instances when the readers are asked to move beyond their comfort zone and join the writer-illustrator on a kind of adventure."

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Reut Barnea, Art and Design Section, Calcalist, August 17, 2020

"The first thing you notice is that this is not an 'ordinary' book: it's a graphic novella, an innovative amalgam of an Artist Book and prose – in which Shinn Ben-Alon is responsible for both the text and the drawings. From the moment you open the book in the unusual way that it opens (upward, like the top of a box), you understand that it holds something different."

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