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 All the Jewish Superheroes
Courtesy AH Comics If you had asked me, when I was a comic book-loving Jewish girl coming of age in 1960s Detroit, besotted with Batman and following Superman’s every adventure, what I wanted to do when I grew up, I may well have described exactly what Steve Bergson does today. Bergson is a “comics scholar.”…
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Books Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman Tell a Whopper With Everything in It
● The Golem of Hollywood By Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman Putnam Adult, 560 pages, $27.95 Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman’s father-and-son opus, “The Golem of Hollywood,” is as ambitious as it is completely ridiculous — and that’s not altogether a bad thing. The novel’s protagonist captures some of the story’s scale and confusion: Jacob Lev is…
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Books Talking With an Angel in Suburban Hell
An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell By Deborah Levy And Other Stories, 96 pages Whether writing with barely suppressed rage or achieving a brisk comic pace, the writing of Deborah Levy rarely lets the reader grow complacent. Her earliest novels, “Beautiful Mutants” and “Swallowing Geography,” channeled Thatcher-era fury through surrealistic modes and landscapes….
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Books A Page-Turner That Tackles Hot-Button Issues
All I Love and Know By Judith Frank William Morrow, 432 pages, $26.99 You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy “All I Love and Know,” Judith Frank’s terrific new novel. Nor do you have to be gay. Although the book addresses issues important to both Jews and gays — Jewish identity, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,…
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Books Reason and Religion Converge in ‘The Mathematician’s Shiva’
The Mathematician’s Shiva By Stuart Rojstaczer Penguin Books, 384 pages, $16.00 Sasha Karnokovitch, narrator of the novel “The Mathematician’s Shiva,” isn’t the warmest of storytellers. Born in Russia at the height of the Cold War to two brilliant mathematicians, Sasha has eschewed the cold Wisconsin town where he came of age in favor of a…
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Books Leonard Maltin’s Last Movie Guide
The word is out. Leonard Maltin’s annual movie guide has fallen into what, in Hollywood speak, would be called “developmental hell.” First published in 1969 and annually since 1986, the new 2015 edition is its last. Like newspapers and other print media, it has fallen victim to the Internet, where much of the information is…
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Books The Clothes We Carried
Musician Rosanne Cash reminisces about a purple shirt that once belonged to her legendary father. Designer Cynthia Rowley rhapsodizes about the Girl Scouts sash that helped ignite her entrepreneurial spark. And an octogenarian Holocaust survivor named Dorothy Finger shares memories of a suit made with a bolt of cloth she took from her childhood home…
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Books YA Romance and ‘Hasidsploitation’
Like No Other By Una Lamarche Razorbill, 352 pages, $17.99 In her new young adult novel, “Like No Other,” author Una Lamarche explores the racial and religious tensions in Crown Heights through the chance encounter of a West Indian boy and a Hasidic girl and the relationship that blossoms between the two. When a hurricane…
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