This is the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Books
The Latest
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Books No Biblical Bodice-Ripper
The Prophet’s Wife By Milton Steinberg Behrman House, 384 pages, $24.95 One expects a book called “The Prophet’s Wife” — with a cover illustration of a lush, bucolic biblical setting — to be one more attempt at cashing in on the recent vogue of romantic, sexually suggestive fiction on biblical themes, written by women, and…
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Books An Eloquent Meditation on Memory
Blooms of Darkness By Aharon Appelfeld Schocken Books, 2010, 288 pp, $24 Aharon Appelfeld has earned an esteemed, if lonely, reputation for himself as Israel’s writer of the Nazi and pre-Nazi era. This landscape and its immediate aftermath form his near-exclusive literary topography. As a result, he is more often compared to Central European Jewish…
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Books The Beaten Cannoneer
Missing a Beat: The Rants and Regrets of Seymour Krim Edited and with an introduction by Mark Cohen Foreword by Dan Wakefield Syracuse University Press, 296 pages, $29.95 Literary criticism is literature that discusses other literature, situating whatever book or poem historically, while at the same time, relating the literary work to the extraliterary: to…
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Books A Murder Mystery In Little Palestine Brings Middle East to America
The fourth assassin: An Omar Yussef Mystery By Matt Beynon Rees Soho Crime, 336 pages, $24 When Omar Yussef arrives in Little Palestine – the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, neighborhood populated by Palestinian-Americans — the aging schoolteacher first finds a headless dead body in his son’s apartment, then watches his son get arrested by an overzealous…
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Books ‘Perfidious Albion’
Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England By Anthony Julius Oxford University Press, 864 pages, $45 A monumental study of English antisemitism proves an astonishing and controversial achievement. If nothing else, “Trials of the Diaspora” is an extraordinary testament to the brilliance of its author. That Anthony Julius, a top London lawyer…
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Books A 21st-Century Schlemiel
The Ask By Sam Lipsyte Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages, $25 He is the anti-hero of the American Jewish novel: bright, only not bright enough; more dreamy than driven, and possessed by insatiable, often misappropriated desires. He does not see himself as beholden to his Jewishness, but neither can he escape it. He was…
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Books A Gangster Grows in Brooklyn
Somehow I missed this when it appeared in November, but Purim seems as good a time as any to catch up on a book whose title character (sort of) is named “Shushan Cats.” “The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats” is a novel by Hesh Kestin (previously the European bureau chief for Forbes), which takes place…
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Books A Graphic Account of the Israeli Countryside
The past year has seen a bumper crop of Jewish-themed graphic novels, with subjects ranging from the recent history of the Middle East (Joe Sacco’s “Footnotes in Gaza”) to the ancient mythology of the Middle East (R. Crumb’s “Genesis”) to the poets of the Beat Generation (Harvey Pekar and Ed Piskor’s “The Beats”). Still, the…
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