They mess you up, your siblings. That’s one takeaway from a new book of essays on the subject of brothers and sisters, “Freud’s Blind Spot,” edited by Elisa Albert. In it, writers dissect what scientists call the horizontal relationships that so shape us but are often ignored. Etgar Keret, Steve Almond and Lauren Grodstein are…
“Saving the world” is a loaded proposition. The children of the 1980s and ‘90s, who heard that phrase have come of age and are often called apathetic, self-absorbed and quietly glued to their screens. Not the case, says Courtney Martin, an editor at Feministing.com and a senior correspondent for the American Prospect Online. Her new…
Nicole Krauss is having banner year. The author of the novels “The History of Love” (W. W. Norton & Company, 2006) and “Man Walks into a Room” (Anchor, 2003) was named one of the New Yorker’s 20 under 40 fiction writers and her new novel, “Great House,” came out the same month it was nominated…
In this week’s Yid Lit, debut author Adam Levin discusses his novel “The Instructions.” The story follows a 10-year-old scholar and weapons expert with a messiah complex who gets kicked out of two yeshivas then stages a coup with a band of Israelites in his secular school after his identity is questioned and he falls…
In a special edition of this week?s Yid Lit podcast, Isaiah Sheffer, founding artistic director of New York?s Symphony Space and host of National Public Radio?s ?Selected Shorts,? reads from the newly rereleased novel by Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer, ?The Magician of Lublin? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Below, a transcript of the conversation…
If you pay for a membership to Netflix or Zipcar, if you’ve gone to a clothing swap, a potluck or given or gotten anything from Craigslist, you’re participating in “collaborative consumption,” the phenomenon of sharing, swapping, borrowing and lending that Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers write in their new book, “What’s Mine is Yours” (Harper…
Contrary to the title of Rebecca Traister’s new book, “Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women,” there’s quite a bit of crying in it: everyone from Sarah Palin to Gloria Steinem, to Traister herself show their emotions in this raw, narrative look at the 2008 race to the presidency from…
Adam Langer’s novel, “The Thieves of Manhattan” uses an all-too-familiar climate of made-up memoirs as a place to set con games. In this Yid Lit Podcast, Langer talks about writing to Stephen Sondheim, world-class literary hoaxes and why he doesn’t think of himself as a Jewish writer. Read the Forward’s review of “The Thieves of…
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