Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Becoming Un-Orthodox By Lynn Davidman Oxford University Press, 272 pages, $27.95 In “Becoming Un-Orthodox,” a study of ex-Orthodox Jews by University of Kansas professor Lynn Davidman, a woman identified only as “Leah” describes Friday night meals in her parents’ home. “Shabbes was kind of a wash,” she says. “My father was always tired and so…
Bookshop owner Bonnie Slotnick took a quick break from packing to have her picture taken outside the 10th Street store. Photographs by Liza Schoenfein I was happy to read at the end of last week that Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks, the beloved little shop on West 10th Street that recently lost its lease, had found new…
Photo: Martyna Starosta Forward 50 members Roz Chast and Gary Shteyngart are among the 30 nominees for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Awards. The award, given to books in the areas of autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction and poetry, is given by the book critics and book review editors of the National Book Critics…
Photo courtesy Rabbit Bandini Productions Capital punishment. Bungee jumping. Cormac McCarthy. Waterboarding. Jackson Pollock. “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Abortion. Rupert Murdoch. The Seattle Mariners. The war in Iraq. The “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” Disneyland. Balding. These are just few of the subjects David Shields and Caleb Powell cover in their new book, “I…
The Jewish Book Council has announced the recipients of the 2015 National Jewish Book Awards. The council began giving out this award — the most prestigious of its kind — in 1948. Past winners include Philip Roth, Chaim Potok and Cynthia Ozick. It’s a pretty important way of giving recognition to the year’s most outstanding…
In 2015, Jewish stories will come in diverse guises — from flights of magical realism to groundbreaking history and biography. Assimilation and tradition assert their warring claims. While memoirist Judy Brown chronicles her escape from a suffocating religious upbringing, Bosnian immigrant and literary prodigy Aleksandar Hemon continues his embrace of Jewish characters and themes. Anniversaries…
Call it a confirmation bias. Everywhere I turned this year, I saw a new expression of Arab Jewish identity. The revival seems to be happening across all fields — literature, food, music — yet somehow nobody’s talking about it. As an Arab Jewish writer (my family hails from Morocco, India and Iraq), I couldn’t be…
Photo: Germain McMicking/Riverhead Books John Safran’s literary debut, “God’ll Cut You Down: The Tangled Tale of A White Supremacist, A Black Hustler, A Murder, and How I Lost Year in Mississippi,” arrived in the U.S. with momentum. The Australian Crime Writers Association had already named it the best true crime book of 2014. New York…
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