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 Too Gross for the 21st Century? Jewish American Cartoonist Milt Gross
On February 7, at New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage, a new publication from New York University Press, “Is Diss A System? A Milt Gross Comic Reader” edited by Ari Y. Kelman, will be presented. Gross (born in 1895) of Russian Jewish ancestry, drew comic strips of wild slapstick energy, following in the violence-for-laughs tradition…
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Books Taking a Cold Shower in Philip Roth’s Room
Someone on the grounds crew at the Corporation of Yaddo, the artists colony in Saratoga Springs N.Y., has a sense of humor. In the “Breast Room” (so-called because Philip Roth wrote “The Breast” while residing in it) of the West House building, the shower is mislabeled. When one turns the dial from off at the…
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Books Bubby Blurbs
First there were book trailers, then there were Old Jews Telling Jokes, and now, for his forthcoming book “Jew and Improved,” Canadian author and National Post editor Benjamin Errett has combined the two online video genres. To promote Errett’s book, which documents his conversion to Judaism, Errett’s wife (and the book’s illustrator) Sarah Lazarovic created…
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Books National Jewish Book Award Winners Announced
The National Jewish Book Award winners were announced Wednesday and there’s good cause for excitement. From an illustrated children’s bible to a gripping young adult novel based on the voyage of the M.S. St. Louis, here are the list of winning books: Jewish Book of the Year Award “Louis D. Brandeis: A Life,” by Melvin…
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Books Books Aren’t Born: Writing and Gestating Just Aren’t Comparable
My son, Shai, was born on January 21, 2007 and two days later, in time for our arrival home from the hospital, a heavy cardboard box arrived in the mail. University of Nebraska Press had sent me 20 copies of my first book, “Houses Of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books,” which I had been…
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Books An Actor Exits
The Humbling By Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 160 pages, $22. Imminence of the end concentrates the craft. German critics employ the term Altersstill — late style — to designate the tendency of such aging masters as Poussin, Beethoven and Beckett to focus their energies on essentials. Once the enfant terrible of American Jewish literature,…
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Books On Becoming a ‘Beaner’: A Mexican American Story
‘Mexicans are the scum of the earth,” a student of mine said after being asked to describe the status of the immigrants at her South Carolina high school. She wasn’t menacing. We’ve known each other for years; she knows I’m both Mexican and an immigrant. My student was simply expressing the general view of the…
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Books Found in Portugal: World Famous Jewish-American Novelist
Though he still maintains his accent and caffeinated New York pulse, Richard Zimler is far better known in Portugal, Turkey, Brazil, France and England than in the United States. He may be the world’s most famous unknown living American Jewish writer. In Portugal, he has been the subject of a television documentary, and the same…
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