Yehoshua's achievement has been recognized throughout the world, and he has been awarded literary prizes in both Israel and the United States. A lively, controversial, and prophetic voice in his homeland, Yehoshua rigorously tests his community's deepest pieties: religion, Zionism, the agony of the Holocaust. He is a Jew who does not believe in God and a committed Zionist, and member of the "peace camp" in Israel who welcomed the Palestinian uprising of 1987.

In the tradition of the Paris Review interviews, Horn's conversations with Yehoshua reveal the intricate play of literary, psychological, mythological, and political motifs in the novelist's work. Stimulated by a warm friendship between the two scholars, the intellectual energy of Facing the Fires offers readers a pleasure they might expect only from fiction.