This is the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Books
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Books 100 Years Later, Revisiting Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ and World War I
This year marks the centennial of two landmarks of modernity: World War I and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.” Both events have their origins in 1914, but neither ever truly ended: Upon his death in 1924, Kafka left behind an unfinished manuscript, while the peacemakers at Versailles left behind an unresolved war. Beyond their incomplete natures,…
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Books Seeking Bernard Malamud on His 100th Birthday
It’s very hard to persuade a friend watching the clock in an office in Midtown Manhattan that at your artist colony in southeastern Wyoming, you — who are eating food made by a country-club chef, sleeping in a free bed, writing in a handsome studio, and taking walks in a landscape of religious beauty —…
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Books What Gabriel Garcia Marquez Taught Me
It is a well-known fact that young men under 18 embrace literature primarily to impress the girls they are trying to seduce. You had to congratulate my ambition: A Soviet-Jewish immigrant kid with funny hair and funnier clothes after an American-born, Catholic, Colombian beauty whom I’ll call C. But I had a secret weapon: the…
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Books A Soviet Journey to Adulthood
Ellen Litman dreamed of being a writer when she went to school in Moscow in the 1980s. There was only one problem: She was Jewish, and thus she was advised to focus on something more practical, since in the Soviet Union, Jews couldn’t be successful at writing. Litman studied math and computer programming, and immigrated…
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Books Remembering Herman Taube, Witness to a Vanished World
Herman Taube, a novelist, poet and longtime Washington correspondent for the Forverts, died March 25 in Rockville, Maryland. He was 96. Born on February 2, 1918, in Lodz, Poland, Taube was orphaned at a young age and was raised by his grandparents, Mirle and Gershon Mandel. In an interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial…
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Books Rock Journalism and Mick Jagger’s Shoes
When Lisa Robinson name-checks Elton, Mick and Iggy, it sounds completely natural. It should; through four decades, the legendary music journalist has been nearly as pivotal a pop figure as her subjects. Robinson famously introduced David Bowie to Iggy Pop, helped The Clash and Elvis Costello score record deals, and hung out with the Beatles….
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Books Deborah Feldman Isn’t Telling You the Whole Story
● Exodus By Deborah Feldman Blue Rider Press, $26.95, 288 pages While Jews around the world are preparing to retell the story of their ancestral exodus from Egypt, another story of an exodus is making its way onto bookshelves. Deborah Feldman, the 27-year-old author of the 2012 best-selling memoir “Unorthodox,” is releasing her second memoir,…
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Books Bosnia Through Muslim Eyes
New York author Susan Shapiro and her Muslim physical therapist, Kenan Trebincevic, bonded, and together they wrote the recently published “The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return” (Penguin Books). The book tells the story of the Bosnian War through Trebincevic’s eyes. In 1992 he was 12 and living a normal, happy childhood,…
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