Sanford Pinsker
By Sanford Pinsker
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Culture ROOFTOP RENAISSANCE
251 West 100th Street, New York, N.Y., 212-865-0600. Scribblers on the Roof: Contemporary American Jewish Fiction Edited by Melvin Jules Bukiet and David G. Roskies Persea Books, 352 pages, $15.95. * * *| At the turn of the past century, New York City’s Lower East Side was more crowded than Calcutta, and out of that…
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Culture In Defense of the (High) Art of Writing
The Din in the Head By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin, 256 pages, $24. * * *| It is a truth (almost) universally acknowledged that any person in possession of a large personal library will covet, if he or she does not already own, essays written by Cynthia Ozick. Why? Because Ozick’s paragraphs contain equal measures…
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Culture The Imagination’s Many Rooms
Jay Neugeboren’s “News From the New American Diaspora and Other Tales of Exile” is not only a cause for celebration in its own right but also an occasion to look back at Neugeboren’s long — and varied — career at the writing desk. Neugeboren’s short stories have been much honored, appearing in some 50 anthologies…
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Culture South Florida, Jewish Families and the Flight of Birds
Andrew Furman is best known for two smart, engaging books of criticism on Jewish-American fiction: “Israel Through the Jewish-American Imagination: A Survey of Jewish-American Literature on Israel” and “Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma.” In an age when the paragraphs of far too many novice critics are bogged down by pretentiousness and heavy-water…
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Culture Spiritual Hunger Artists
Joy Comes in the Morning By Jonathan Rosen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pages, $25. —— Jonathan Rosen came to wide public attention, first as the editor (for some 10 years) of this newspaper’s highly regarded Arts & Letters section, and then as the author of “Eve’s Apple” (Random House Inc., l997), an impressive debut…
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News Now Eligible for Medicare, Augie March Still Longs To Entertain
The Adventures of Augie March, 50th Anniversary Edition By Saul Bellow Viking, 586 pages, $29.95. * * *| It has been 50 years since Augie March, Saul Bellow’s thickly textured, picaresque protagonist, first declared that he was “going everywhere!” and moreover that he intended to travel in style. After all, he was “an American, Chicago…
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News Down and Out on San Remo Drive
San Remo Drive By Leslie Epstein Handsel Books, 236 pages, $26 * * *| A reviewer once said of Leslie Epstein’s early collection of tragic-comic short stories: “If writers got gold stars for the risks they took, Leslie Epstein would get a handful.” Indeed, Epstein’s work is replete with “risks,” with efforts to combine high…
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News A Farewell to Partisan Review, Bracing ‘Family of Freethinkers’
It’s been more than a decade since I first submitted a piece to Partisan Review — it was a review of Sidney Hook’s letters — and received a typed note from William Phillips, the journal’s co-founder and longtime editor, telling me that, with some minor changes, he’d print it. I was overjoyed, partly because any…
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