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 Comic Books and Country Music
The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song By Frank M. Young and David Lasky Abrams, 192 pages, $24.95 With a recent issue of Time magazine declaring “The Carter Family” to be one of the seven best comics of 2012, artist David Lasky has ascended to the top tier of Jewish-American comic artists, an august group…
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Books Q&A With Novelist Jami Attenberg
Jami Attenberg is the author of “Instant Love,” “The Kept Man,” “The Melting Season” and, most recently, “The Middlesteins,” which Interview magazine called “juicy, delicious, dark smorgasbörd of a novel. (It is that and more.) “The Middlesteins” is the story of a Midwestern Jewish family’s relationships, realizations and appetites. Attenberg spoke with The Sisterhood about…
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Books Q&A With Novelist Yona Zeldis McDonough
“A Wedding in Great Neck:” Family Mishegas Arrives Just in Time for the Nuptials Yona Zeldis McDonough’s new novel “A Wedding in Great Neck” takes place over the course of a single day, as a Jewish family gathers for the lavish wedding (to a handsome Israeli) of Angleica, the aptly-named youngest daughter who at least…
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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,…
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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…
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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….
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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…
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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…
Explore
Most Popular
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
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Opinion Outrage over Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed on sexual assault of Palestinians is missing the point
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Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
In Case You Missed It
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Opinion I run The Jewish Theological Seminary. Here’s the real story about President Isaac Herzog speaking at our commencement
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Opinion Outrage over Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed on sexual assault of Palestinians is missing the point
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News Why do some people think Mike Lawler is Jewish?
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Art At the Venice Biennale, protests, self-mutilation and rage against Israel and Russia. Is anyone left to talk about the art?