Susan Comninos
By Susan Comninos
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News When Meyer Lansky Fell in Love with a Holocaust Survivor
● I Pity the Poor Immigrant: A Novel By Zachary Lazar Little, Brown and Company, 256 pages, $25 In photographs from my high school years, I’m often blinking against the light. My smile and shut eyes look like an evasion of the camera’s flash, of the picture itself. Looking now at that face, I imagine…
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Culture Peter Orner Will Break Your Heart
Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge By Peter Orner Little, Brown, 208 pages, $16.99 Every seasoned author has overarching themes that he or she explores, to success or failure, across a series of books. Mediocrity and defeat — twin afflictions that beset the narrators in Peter Orner’s mournful and moving fiction — are worthy companions,…
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Culture Klezmer Musician’s Death Plunges Author Into Exploration of Madness and Grief
● The Guardians: An Elegy By Sarah Manguso Picador, 104 pages, $20. American Jewish author Sarah Manguso’s “The Guardians: An Elegy” is a strip map of a memoir about Manguso’s grief at the suicide of a close friend, a klezmer musician who suffered from recurring psychosis. Lean, elliptical and beautifully written, her book, recently released…
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Culture Radio Kvetcher Jonathan Goldstein Is Still Learning How To Grow Up
Montreal humorist Jonathan Goldstein, 43, so often pairs kvetching with kvelling that it’s become a signature of the writer, whose joint Canadian and United States citizenship has him bestriding North America’s border. When I arrived to interview him at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., where he produces his meta-reality radio show “WireTap” — in its ninth…
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Culture What Has He Done To Deserve This?
Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked By James Lasdun Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pages, $25 A small boy flees across a bridge. Assassins follow, begging for a taste of his blood to eat with dessert: “to top off the honey.” Eventually, the boy surrenders his head, submitting to his beheaders’ crazed illogic:…
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News Shushing the Monkeys in His Mind
Daniel Smith experiences the constant worrying one might expect of an air-traffic controller, a wartime president or a brain surgeon. But he is none of the above. Instead, he is the uneasy American Jewish author of a new book, “Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety” (Simon & Schuster), a clear-eyed tragicomic recap of his past…
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News From Dude to Dad
No occasion drags formality out of Jewish humorist Dan Zevin. Instead, when the Forward called to interview him at the set time of 10 a.m. on a Sunday, he was dripping wet. “Actually, I’m just getting out of the shower and walking down the hall to my office,” he confessed. “You know what? Let me…
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Culture Lucette Lagnado’s Second Memoir of Cairo and Brooklyn Concentrates on Her Mother
The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, From Cairo to Brooklyn By Lucette Lagnado Ecco/HarperCollins, 416 pages, $25.99 No happy ending immediately follows an exodus from Egypt. Readers of the Tanach and of the prizewinning debut memoir by Egyptian-born journalist Lucette Lagnado, “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit” (Ecco/HarperCollins), know this….
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