Antiquities By Cynthia Ozick Knopf, 192 pages, $21.00 Thornton Wilder’s classic play “Our Town” proposes a remarkable idea: That after death, we get to re-experience a single day from our lives — just one perfectly ordinary day. It’s a painful, startling scenario, a striking conclusion to a complicated existence. “I can’t look at everything hard…
The idea of Anne Frank surviving has been done, frankly, to death — almost always, by men.
It’s Earth Day this weekend, and while it may not feel like springtime yet, do your best to get out and volunteer in your community. To reward yourself for your volunteering efforts, check out some of the weekend’s best culture to boot. 1) Read Cynthia Ozick, a grand dame of American letters, turned 90 this…
This Month Anne Reads: “Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife,” by Cynthia Ozick. Cynthia Ozick published her first Puttermesser tale in The New Yorker in 1982. The sequels were published in that magazine soon after, and then all parts were collected into a book (a novel) in 1997. That book became a finalist…
CRITICS, MONSTERS, FANATICS, AND OTHER LITERARY ESSAYS By Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 224 pages, $25 It’s a little tricky, perhaps, to complain about Cynthia Ozick’s take on book reviewers in “Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays” when I made my living for many years reviewing books. How can I play anything other than…
● Saul Bellow’s Heart: A Son’s Memoir By Greg Bellow Bloomsbury USA, 240 pages, $25 Trying to imagine the literary landscape of the 20th century without Saul Bellow is a tough task. If Bellow hadn’t published “The Adventures of Augie March” in 1953, you would have to reconsider how the entire American Jewish contribution to…
The latest issue of Habitus features eight poems by Esther Dischereit. The winners of the 2011 Rappaport Prize, a one million dollar award given annually to two Israel painters, have been announced. Woodie Allen talks about his controversial marriage. Cynthia Ozick accepts the Jewish Book Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Philip Glass is so prolific that…
The finalists for the 2011 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature have been announced. Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum and Library has become home to Maurice Sendak’s only mural. Jonah Lehrer retrieves Thorstein Veblen’s forgotten essay on why Jews become intellectuals. An Iranian grandmaster claims to have beaten an Israeli chess record after playing 614 people simultaneously…
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