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 Toothy in Gotham
Chronic City By Jonathan Lethem Doubleday, 480 pages, $27.95. ‘Chronic City” initially seemed an important and pleasurable novel to review, just as it must have initially seemed, to Jonathan Lethem, an important and pleasurable novel to write. The ideal reviewer, as if a character in science fiction, relives the writer’s experience word by word, sentence…
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Books Immortal Bloodsucking Opportunists
Angel Time: The Songs of the Seraphim By Anne Rice Knopf, 268 pages, $25.95. Anne Rice declared in 2005 in the Author’s Note to her novel “Christ the Lord” that her return to Catholicism meant she would no longer “write anything that wasn’t for Christ.” She professed no more vampires, since they reflected a “world…
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Books Six Takes on God
God According to God: A Physicist Proves We’ve Been Wrong About God All Along By Gerald L. Schroeder HarperOne, 256 pages, $25.99. The Evolution of God By Robert Wright Little, Brown and Company, 567 pages, $25.99. Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate By Terry Eagleton Yale University Press, 200 pages, $25.00. Saving…
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Books S. An-sky: More Than Just ‘The Dybbuk’
Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions Eugene M. Avrutin, ed. Brandeis University Press University Press of New England 2009; 228 pages $39.95 For frenziedly creative polymaths, the French may have Jean Cocteau, but the Jews have Belarus-born Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport, who wrote poems, fiction, ethnography and plays under the pen name…
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Books Double Trouble: Two Newish Novels Sport Eerily Similar Covers
Here’s a situation that harkens back to flipping through children’s magazines in my pediatrician’s office waiting room: What’s the difference between these two pictures? Lucinda Rosenfeld’s “I’m So Happy For You” (Back Bay Books, July 2009) and Laurie Graff’s “The Shiksa Syndrome” (Broadway Books, October, 2008) may have hit shelves more than a year apart,…
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Books Kindling Desire
The only meaning listed in the Oxford English Dictionary for the noun “kindle” is: “The young (of any animal), a young one.” And, despite Amazon’s best efforts, it’s still much easier to find out that information on my phone or my PC than it is on their own Kindle. For those who haven’t yet been…
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Books Chagall’s Political Art
Suspended in white space, a goat romps and a rooster struts across a modest book cover. Beneath them, running right to left, is the Yiddish word “mayselekh” — less a title than a simple description of what’s inside: two little stories for children. The book, which is more like a pamphlet, is small enough to…
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Books Ruth Wisse: Generous Mentor, Worthy Adversary
Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon: Essays on Literature and Culture in Honor of Ruth R. Wisse Edited by Justin Daniel Cammy, Dara Horn, Alyssa Quint and Rachel Rubinstein *Harvard University Press, 750 pages, $75. * In September 1976, Commentary printed the letters of three novelists who had taken umbrage at appraisals of their work, in…
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