By Eryn Loeb
In
“Unexpectedly Eighty: And Other Adaptations,” Viorst offers droll, poignant meditations on growing older and wiser, and on what it means to become more limited. She offers odes to continued health, and boasts of her status as a “three-desserts grandmother.” And in this volume, her pithy observations give way to weightier considerations, such as the inevitability of death, and the possibility of an afterlife.
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By Eryn Loeb
Although Gregory Levey briefly worked as a speechwriter for Ariel Sharon (a job he more or less fell into, and which he recounted in his 2008 book “Shut Up, I’m Talking: And Other Diplomacy Lessons I Learned in the Israeli Government”), he’s no expert in Middle East politics. His official experience left him feeling no more knowledgeable and no less powerless than the masses when it comes to the prospect of peace in the region.
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By Eryn Loeb
A fierce believer in the power and possibility of fairy tales,
Kate Bernheimer has explored the genre’s history in essays and scholarship, edited anthologies of and about fairy tales, founded a literary journal focused on them (
Fairy Tale Review) and written fresh tales of her own — as short stories, novels, and children’s books. It’s an area of focus that challenges her to be both a preservationist and an inventor.
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By Eryn Loeb
Sam Munson is the former online editor of commentary magazine, the grandson of the neoconservative thinker and writer Norman Podhoretz, and now, newly, the author of a stunning debut novel, “The November Criminals.” The novel follows high school senior Addison Schacht, an upper-middle class, Jewish teenager in suburban D.C, as he becomes obsessed with the murder of one of his classmates — a classmate he barely knew. He sat down with the Forward’s Nadja Spiegelman to discuss secular Judaism, teen angst and the ’90s.
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By Eryn Loeb
Adam Langer and his father, Seymour, had what Langer describes as “a typical relationship between a Depression-era father and son.” His dad, he writes in his new memoir, “My Father’s Bonus March,” was “a man I respected and admired but around whom I rarely felt at ease,” a man wary of discussing his life with any of his four children. This withholding only made Langer more determined to figure out the substance of his father’s infrequent overtures — a pursuit that gained momentum after the elder Langer died in 2005.
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When Hank Greenberg Met Jackie Robinson
Reconsider Decision on Rabbis and Intermarriage
Ultra-Orthodox Men Ditch All-Black Attire as Fashion Trumps Tradition
Is Steven Hawking’s Decision To Boycott an Israeli Conference Boon to BDS?
Claims Conference Blames Dead Official for Fraud Snafu
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