This is the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Books
The Latest
-
Books Author Blog: Passing on Stories
Earlier this week, Jami Attenberg wrote about growing up Jewish in a small town. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: My mother was in town for a few days that summer,…
-
Books Paul Goodman Speaks for Half a Generation
Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in an Organized Society By Paul Goodman Foreword by Casey Nelson Blake New York Review Books, Classic Series, 312 pages, $17.95 Reading Paul Goodman’s reissued 1960s classic “Growing Up Absurd” may make you nostalgic for a past you never lived. The author’s uncomplicated idealism evokes an earlier decade of…
-
Books Michael Chabon’s Life Is Reflected in ‘Telegraph Avenue’
Even for a particularly verdant block in Berkeley, Calif., Michael Chabon’s home is an oasis amidst the university town clatter and clutter. The brown-shingled house is situated on a flowery patch complete with a wooden fence, a warm front porch and a bouncing Labradoodle named Mabel, who happily charges to the gate to greet visitors….
-
Books Mark Helprin’s Politics Doesn’t Get in Way of Prose
In Sunlight And In Shadow By Mark Helprin Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 705 pages, $28 Readers indifferent to Mark Helprin’s strident neoconservatism are often won over by Mark Helprin the literary writer — his energetic prose, his intricate plotting, the dreamlike images in novels such as “Refiner’s Fire,” “A Soldier of the Great War” and “Freddy…
-
Books Hans Keilson’s First Novel Depicts Life Before Nazis
Life Goes On By Hans Keilson Translated by Damion Searls Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 272 pages, $15 Two years ago, when Farrar, Straus and Giroux released translations of his novels “The Death of the Adversary” and “Comedy in a Minor Key,” centenarian Hans Keilson told Steven Erlanger of The New York Times that he would…
-
Books Q&A: Michael Feinstein on the Gershwins and ‘Porgy’
When Michael Feinstein was in his 20s, he had the good fortune to work as an assistant and archivist for the great Ira Gershwin, who, with his brother George, wrote some of the greatest and most beloved songs in American history. Now a beloved singer in his own right, Feinstein spoke with the Forward about…
-
Books Jami Attenberg Phones Home
My new novel, “The Middlesteins,” follows the lives of the titular suburban Chicago Jewish family, whose matriarch is obsessed with food, a thing with which I am also very much interested in myself. Your relationship with food is often informed by a parent’s relationship with it, so I decided to go to one of the…
-
Books Rachel Tzvia Back’s Verse Confronts Devastating Loss
A Messenger Comes By Rachel Tzvia Back Singing Horse Press, 110 Pages, $15 Mourning propels us. We are, none of us, immune. It is the first thing children fear: loss — of a parent, a friend, a sibling, a grandparent — and the first lie we tell them, or half-truth we impart, as parents, promising,…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Fast Forward A whites-only, no-Jews community says it’s found a legal loophole. A Jewish lawmaker in Pennsylvania wants to close it.
- 2
Film & TV So, what’s the deal with the honey scene in ‘Marty Supreme?’
- 3
Culture Why do Jews eat Chinese food on Christmas?
- 4
Opinion What if Donald Trump puts his name on the US Holocaust Memorial Museum?
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Absolute Bagels is back — and Jewish New Yorkers are lining up in droves
-
Music How I found freedom in a Passover Seder, an amp and a red Fender Duo-Sonic guitar
-
Fast Forward In a first, President Donald Trump to receive Israel Prize, the country’s top civilian honor
-
Fast Forward Trump, hosting Netanyahu in Florida, says next phase of Gaza ceasefire plan will begin ‘as quickly as we can’
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
