For fans of Rumaan Alam's LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND and the HBO smash hit THE LAST OF US, Benjamin Resnick's NEXT STOP is a speculative novel that explores the precariousness of Jewish American life.

A black hole consumes the State of Israel, ushering in a time of peril and miracles. Similar anomalies begin to appear in major cities around the world. As the anomalies begin to spread, the world wonders: will the holes swallow the Jews, or they will swallow the earth? Against a backdrop of antisemitic paranoia, restrictions on Jewish life, and spasms of violence, Ethan and Ella, Jewish citizens of a nameless American city, meet and fall in love. Ella, a photojournalist, documents the changes in daily life, particularly among the city's Jewish residents. Some Jews, feeling inexplicably drawn to the anomalies, go underground to an abandoned subway system that seems to connect the entire world. Others leave for the south, forming militias and stockpiling weapons. But most, like Ethan, Ella and her young son Michael, stay. But then, shortly after Passover, thousands of commercial planes are sucked from the sky. Air travel stops. Borders close. Refugees pour into the capital. Eventually all Jews in the city are forced to relocate to the Pale, a traditionally Jewish neighborhood sandwiched between a park and a river. There, under the watchful eye of border guards, drones, and robotic dogs, the city's Jews form a fragile new society. Ethan, Ella, and Michael must now find a way to protect their new blended family. Eventually, they choose to go underground, hoping to board a train that might take them someplace safe. Benjamin Resnick serves as the rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center in New York. His fiction has appeared in The Portland Review, Clare Magazine, and in the online journal Hirschworth, and he has been a finalist for the Raymond Carver Award for Short Fiction and the Iowa Review Award for Short Fiction. Resnick's nonfiction and academic writing has appeared in Modern Judaism, the Jewish Daily Forward, Tablet Magazine, and several other publications.