This is the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Books
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Books Roth the Invincible
A prolific novelist, Philip Roth, at 78, has authored 31 novels and received the most distinguished literary awards, including, most recently, the Man Booker International Prize, which was awarded to him yesterday despite heavy opposition from one of the judges, Carmen Calil. Calil, a feminist author and publisher, criticized Roth’s repetitiveness and resigned from the…
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Books Q&A: Novelist Haley Tanner on Love After Death
Haley Tanner’s debut novel, “Vaclav & Lena” (Dial Press), is about love without questions, hesitation or limits. This love flourishes between two Russian-Jewish immigrant children in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn: Vaclav dreams of becoming a magician, like Houdini, and casting the fragile Lena as his assistant. Tragedy temporarily unhinges this plan, and when…
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Books Blowing the Whistle on Illegal Internships
Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy By Ross Perlin Verso, 2011, $22.95 Every year, hundreds of thousands of interns in the U.S. work without pay or for less than minimum wage. Many of these unpaid or underpaid internships are at for-profit companies and closely resemble regular work:…
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Books Scatterbrained, but a Star
Crossposted from Haaretz A large pigeon roosts on the roof of a house in the picture that opens the new edition of “Ha-Mefuzar Mi-Kfar Azar” (“The Absent-Minded Guy from Kefar Azar,” Am Oved, 1968), by Leah Goldberg. Goldberg’s book, based on a work by Russian Jewish writer Samuil Marsha, originally appeared with illustrations that she…
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Books The Furrier, the Psychoanalyst and the Assassin
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish. As one unravels the history of the 20th century, it becomes apparent how deeply individual lives were woven into the larger fabric of world events. From the shtetls of Eastern Europe a new generation of Jewish youth emerged whose exploits shook the entire world. Now, after the…
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Books Memory, Scent and My Mother
Earlier this week, Molly Birnbaum wrote about her first writing teacher and the scent of Passover. Her blog posts are being featured this week 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 visit: This past Sunday was Mother’s Day….
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Books András Mezei’s Holocaust Poetry for Our Time
András Mezei (1930-2008) was a major Jewish-Hungarian poet who left behind a retrospective exploration of the Holocaust for our time. There are many voices speaking to us of terror, folly, greed, cruelty and absurdity, but Mezei’s poetry makes them sound like our own voices. His testimony has been published in England, in my translation, as…
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Books The Scent of Passover
On Monday, Molly Birnbaum wrote about her first writing teacher. Her blog posts are being featured this week 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 visit: On the first night of Passover, my boyfriend and I attended a…
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