Murder, sex, dystopia and madness earned spots on the diverse longlist for the 2019 Booker Prize.
Read the quote and tell us what you think: Is she joking? Or serious?
“The Handmaid’s Tale,” the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel, seems quite relevant today. The show offers lessons for Jewish audiences too.
Atwood sang the praises of her fellow Canadian.
“The Handmaid’s Tale,” the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel, seems especially relevant today. The show offers some lessons for Jewish audiences too.
Michael Wex is best known for his acerbic, authoritative books on Yiddish language and culture, but in this fall’s “The Frumkiss Family Business,” he has turned his attention to fiction. The sprawling novel is a farcical family saga, following three generations of a Jewish clan in Toronto’s Bathurst Manor neighborhood and questioning, in Wex’s characteristically hilarious way, the role of Jewish culture in a secular society. Recently, Wex took some time prior to his October 30 appearance at Toronto’s International Festival of Authors to speak to The Arty Semite about his new novel, the Canadian Jewish experience, and being compared to other Jewish writers.
As we saw with the Batsheva Dance Company in 2009 and the Jerusalem Quartet in March, when it comes to Israel, even the most straightforward arts organizations have the potential to become the subjects of political controversy. The most recent flare-up centered around Canadian author Margaret Atwood, who accepted the Dan David Prize for literature on Sunday at Tel Aviv University, despite protestations from Palestinian groups who urged her to turn it down.