The late, great Italian novelist and memoirist Natalia Ginzburg once observed that everything that one writes is a little autobiographical. Glimmers of Jessamyn Hope’s personal story are scattered throughout her lovely, memorable and newly published novel, “Safekeeping.” Hope’s impressive roman a clef takes place in 1994 and its events are set into motion early on…
At first glance Alfred and Sylvia Lawrie were hardly the sort of people one would have called intimidating. Alfred was in his late 70s, tall and vague, one of those elderly men who stay long and skinny in the arms and legs, but put on weight in the middle. His beard was white and haphazard,…
(JTA) — Forget Iran and anti-Semitism. Lavie Tidhar and British fantasy author Rebecca Levene’s newly released short-story anthologies “Jews Versus Aliens” and “Jews Versus Zombies” (both published by Jurassic London, with all profits going to MOSAC, a British group that assists victims of child sex abuse), have Jews literally taking on a whole new world of…
Sami Rohr Prize winner Ayelet Tsabari / Elsin Davidi Ayelet Tsabari, author of the short story collection “The Best Place On Earth” (HarperCollins 2013), has won the prestigious Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature — and I couldn’t be happier about it. A couple of months ago, I issued one of those pre-New-Year’s calls for…
● The Mathematician’s Shiva By Stuart Rojstaczer Penguin Books, 384 pages, $16 If you have never heard of the Navier-Stokes problem in mathematics, after reading Stuart Rojstaczer’s rollicking first novel, “The Mathematician’s Shiva,” you might claim to know something about it, though explaining its significance to a friend may remain impossible. The story revolves around…
● The Zone of interest By Martin Amis Knopf, 320 pages, $26.95 Martin Amis’s new novel “The Zone of Interest,” which is set in post-Wannsee Auschwitz, is dedicated “[t]o those who survived and to those who did not; to the memory of Primo Levi… and to the memory of Paul Celan.” The dedication continues: “to…
(Haaretz) — Imagine a young Orthodox woman being forced, against her will, to marry an older man who disgusts her. Seeing no way out, she commits suicide – by drowning herself in a mikveh. Now imagine another young Orthodox woman being forced to marry an older man who repulses her. She goes ahead and marries him,…
● 10:04 By Ben Lerner 256 pages, Faber and Faber, $25 What is a novel? What purpose does it serve? In what way does the novel engage with the reader and what is the intellectual, emotional, dare I say, ontological texture of the exchange between the two? How much fidelity must a novel show to…
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