Before he started writing, novelist and journalist Tom Rachman had a peculiar visual image: A child being led into a room with a couple of adults who pay no special attention to her. The person who brings her there leaves, and the child sits quietly in a corner. As the hours pass, it becomes clear…
South African Nobel Prize-winning author Nadine Gordimer, an uncompromising moralist who became one of the most powerful voices against the injustices of apartheid, has died, her family said on Monday. Gordimer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, died peacefully at her Johannesburg home on Sunday evening in the presence of her…
● I Pity the Poor Immigrant: A Novel By Zachary Lazar Little, Brown and Company, 256 pages, $25 In photographs from my high school years, I’m often blinking against the light. My smile and shut eyes look like an evasion of the camera’s flash, of the picture itself. Looking now at that face, I imagine…
A best-selling German satirical novel about the return of Adolf Hitler to modern-day Germany is being adapted into a film. “Er Ist Wieder Da,” German for “He’s Back,” sold 1.3 million copies in Germany after its 2012 release. In the book, Hitler awakens in modern-day Berlin and garners enough attention to become host of his…
Are there toilets on the Temple Mount? I needed to find out. You see, a main character in a novel I was writing, “In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist,” is a toilet cleaner on the Temple Mount. Naturally, I wanted to know what the bathroom area looked like. As much as possible, I wanted the…
Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge By Peter Orner Little, Brown, 208 pages, $16.99 Every seasoned author has overarching themes that he or she explores, to success or failure, across a series of books. Mediocrity and defeat — twin afflictions that beset the narrators in Peter Orner’s mournful and moving fiction — are worthy companions,…
When you think Sidney Poitier, many things come to mind: “In the Heat of the Night,” first black actor to win an Oscar, legend… “Jewish” isn’t one of those things. And yet surprisingly, the main character in his debut novel, “Montaro Caine,” is Jewish, as are many of the characters. What’s more, in an interview…
Ben Schrank and author and frequent Forward contributor Joshua Furst met up at The Brooklyn Inn with the intention of drinking some beer and discussing fiction, Brooklyn and their complicated relationships with Jewishness. Schrank recently published his wise, big-hearted new novel, “Love Is a Canoe.” Since much of the story revolves around publishing and the…
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