Words of the Week: Daniel Handler on I.B. Singer

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Isaac Bashevis Singer
Isaac Bashevis Singer

“Though Singer was an American writer, with a couple of National Book Awards to prove it, that doesn’t feel like the right nationality to put down on the Nobel list. Nor does Polish, which matches his birthplace. Jew is the word we’re looking for here. He’s not the first Jew to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, but he’s the first one to win it for writing in Yiddish, and we’re not going to see another one.”

Source: Daniel Handler, “What the Swedes Read,” a recurring column in The Believer. The column on Singer appeared in the May 2014 issue, which I had the delight of thumbing through over the weekend.

Sunday Sentence

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled


In which I participate in David Abrams’s “Sunday Sentence” project, sharing the best sentence I’ve read during the past week, “out of context and without commentary.”

Eventually a poem was accepted by Poetry (Submission No. 179) and then The New Yorker (Submission No. 240), and that changed everything.

Source: Jesse Lichtenstein, “The Smutty-Metaphor Queen of Lawrence, Kansas” (profile of Patricia Lockwood), The New York Times Magazine.

Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat

by Erika Dreifus on
Disabled

Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen

Every Friday morning My Machberet presents an assortment of Jewish-interest links, primarily of the literary variety.

  • “A decade after its publication, Canadian author David Bezmozgis is turning his debut short story collection, ‘Natasha and Other Stories,’ into a film.”
  • The Well Versed blog chimes in with a dispatch from the Fourth International Writers Festival in Jerusalem.
  • Fathom interviews Philip Mendes regarding his new book, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance.
  • Read Hebrew? You may want to look into Granta Israel. Beth Kissileff has the background.
  • On my own weekend reading agenda: Saul Bellow’s “A Silver Dish,” now available on NewYorker.com.

    • Shabbat shalom.