This is the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Books
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Books Cyril Kornbluth’s Postwar Dystopias
Readers of the intelligently edited anthologies “Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy & Science Fiction” and “More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction,” both from Jewish Lights Publishing, are aware that the postwar development of the sci-fi genre was to a large extent a Yiddishe invention. Alongside…
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Books Jewish Impostors, Past and Present
Although Shabbetai Zevi naturally gets most of the attention, Jewish history has been marked by a series of impostors. On February 16, Bloomsbury USA publishes a collection by the late New Yorker reporter St. Clair McKelway, “Reporting at Wit’s End,” which includes the complete 1968 book “The Big Little Man from Brooklyn” about the Jewish…
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Books An Arabic Bestseller About Beirut’s Jews
A new book, documenting Lebanon’s largely vanished Jewish community is a bestseller — in Arabic. In fact, “Wad Abu Jamil,” a book by BBC journalist Nada Abdelsamad named after the formerly Jewish neighborhood in Beirut, is available only in Arabic, though translations into English and French are forthcoming. According to Alexandra Sandels of the LA…
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Books And Dylan Saw That It Was Good
Children’s books written by celebrities are pretty conventional these days. So it’s strange that Bob Dylan — who’s gotten nothing if not weirder over the past few years — is publishing one. But in reality, Dylan’s latest children’s book was already written, back in 1979. According a recent press release, “Man Gave Names to All…
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Books Harry Houdini Escapes from the Library of Congress
The great escape artist Harry Houdini may have been finally done in by a well-aimed punch to the gut, but his spirit endures. And not just because of the yearly séance, either. Besides being the “Handcuff King and Jail Breaker,” Houdini was also a prolific author. Now, the entirety of The Harry Houdini Collection from…
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Books J.D. Salinger, Reclusive Author, Rabbi’s Grandson, Is Dead at 91
J.D. Salinger, a grandson of a rabbi and an author whose fiction has held the deep affection of generations of readers, died January 27 at age 91. So extreme was the reclusion of the author, who wrote such books as “The Catcher in the Rye” and “Franny and Zooey,” that there will be no funeral…
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Books Stanford Hogs the Rohr Prize
Two Stanford PhDs — Kenneth Moss and Sarah Abrevaya Stein — have shared the latest Sami Rohr Prize. In a move the committee has characterized as “unprecedented” (i.e. they didn’t do it the one other time they awarded the non-fiction prize) the top prize has been shared and the second prize scrapped. What goes unmentioned…
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Books Forward Favorites for the National Book Critics Awards
The National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its annual book awards on Saturday, which include Benjamin Moser’s “Why This World,” a biography of the Brazilian Jewish novelist Clarice Lispector. Born Chaya Lispector in Chechelnik, Ukraine in 1920, Lispector was brought to Brazil as an infant. There she went on to write books such…
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