I may be one of the few writers who was not surprised this past November to read about Philip Roth’s retirement, nor was I inspired to sit shiva for the American Jewish novel. When our media announced the news (a month after being scooped by the French magazine Les Inrocks), a spate of commentary appeared…
For most of her adult life, Beverly Akerman was a molecular genetics researcher at McGill University and the Montreal Children’s Hospital. But in 2003, after several years of feeling an underlying malaise and professional unhappiness, she decided to make a mid-life career switch. Following dreams she set aside for 20 years as a busy working…
From time to time I like to go to a bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan called The Magician. It’s the décor that draws me. The Magician has the straight lines, dark wood and high polish of early-to-midcentury art deco style that make me feel, for an hour or two, like the hero…
Forty years ago, Gail Parent wrote a groundbreaking novel on what was at the time a fairly unexplored topic: the unmarried career woman. The book, “Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York,” completed over a period of a year and a half while Parent was simultaneously writing for “The Carol Burnett Show,” is…
I’m surely not the only girl with literary tendencies to have come of age in the 1980s assiduously following Anna Quindlen’s journalism career — reading her columns in The New York Times and pretty much wanting to be her when I grew up. Back in the Stone Age, before the Internet, before blogs and their…
Kasher in the Rye: The True Tale of a White Boy from Oakland Who Became a Drug Addict, Criminal, Mental Patient, and Then Turned 16 By Moshe Kasher Grand Central Publishing, 320 pages, $24.99 Flatscreen: A Novel By Adam Wilson Harper Perennial, 336 pages, $14.99 Since when did alcoholism and drug addiction become part of…
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…
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