Today D. A. Mishani continues with his series “The Mystery of the Hebrew Detective,” where he has been investigating why it’s so difficult to write a detective in Israel. Read installment one here and installment two here. His first detective novel, “The Missing File,” was published by Harper. His blog posts are featured on The…
Yesterday, D. A. Mishani wondered why it’s so difficult to write a detective in Hebrew. His first detective novel, “The Missing File,” was published by Harper. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please…
Actress, author, and activist Annabelle Gurwitch is the author of three books: “Autumn Leaves,” “You Say Tomato, I Say Shut Up,” and “Fired!” Her comedic memoir for Blue Rider imprint at Penguin will be published in Spring 2014. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My…
D. A. Mishani is an Israeli crime writer, editor, and literary scholar, specializing in the history of detective fiction. His first detective novel, “The Missing File,” was published in by Harper. His blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more…
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…
Summertime, when the living is said to be easier and vacations beckon, can favor us with more reading time. But heat doesn’t necessarily mean light — and not all our book suggestions, split evenly between new releases in fiction and nonfiction, are typical beach fare. Though cineplexes fill with frothy comedies and special-effects epics, publishing…
● La Boutique Obscure By Georges Perec Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker Melville House, 214 pages, $18.95 The Anglophone world is currently undergoing one of its periodical revivals — this time, of the panegyric experimentalism and formalist frolics of the French avant-garde literary collective Oulipo. The Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a…
● The Golem and the Jinni By Helene Wecker HarperCollins. 496 pages, $26.99 In “The Golem and the Jinni,” Helene Wecker mines the mysticism of two peoples to masterfully create a magical world out of clay and fire. Her story is so inventive, so elegantly written, so well constructed, it is hard to believe that…
The Property By Rutu Modan, translated by Jessica Cohen Drawn & Quarterly, 232 pages, $24.95 The past takes many forms in Rutu Modan’s graphic novel “The Property.” There is Regina, an elderly woman returning to Poland from Israel for the first time in over 60 years; overzealous re-enactors encountered by her granddaughter Mica on the…
Louisa May Alcott was often told as a child that her dark hair and dark eyes came from her Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Her mother, Abigail May Alcott, who had similar coloring, had learned this from her father, Joseph May, a late 18th-century Boston businessman whose Portuguese Jewish ancestors immigrated to Sussex, England, just before 1500….
By the time I was 5, I was already an outcast. It was the early 1960s, and I was part of the only Jewish family in a decidedly Christian suburb of Waltham, Mass. Brandeis University, the only thing Jewish about Waltham, was 20 minutes away. We had moved to Waltham because we couldn’t stay in…
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