Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat

Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
Every Friday morning My Machberet presents an assortment of Jewish-interest links, primarily of the literary variety.

  • In “Love Me, Love My Book,” The Jewish Week‘s Editor/Publisher, Gary Rosenblatt, reports on his experience as participant and observer in the latest Jewish Book Council “Meet the Author” event.
  • A hearty mazal tov to the winners of the latest Anna Davidson Rosenberg Poetry Awards (including my former poetry teacher, Matthew Lippman). Bonus: We can read the winning poems online.
  • A contemporary opera I don’t think I’ll be going to see.
  • In time for Father’s Day: Tablet and Marjorie Ingall present “The 13 Worst Jewish Fathers in Literature.”
  • And over on The Whole Megillah, you’ll find an interview with Michelle Caplan, Editor-in-Chief of Fig Tree Books. (You’ve seen FTB mentioned here on My Machberet before, but as a reminder, it’s “a new literary publishing house founded by Fredric Price, a successful entrepreneur in the orphan drug industry who wants to publish high quality fiction about the American Jewish experience (AJE).”)
  • Shabbat shalom.

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

    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.

    Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat

    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.

    Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat

    Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
    Every Friday morning My Machberet presents an assortment of Jewish-interest links, primarily of the literary variety.

  • Atar Hadari explains why we read the book of Ruth on Shavuot.
  • “The Rabbi’s Wife”: a short story by Robin Black.
  • In “Ex-Hasidic Writers Go Off the Path and Onto the Page,” Ezra Glinter explores “How OTD Literature Became Its Own Literary Genre.” (See the article for a definition of “OTD”.)
  • On my agenda: listening to this podcast featuring George Prochnik, talking about his new biography, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World.
  • Judith Thurman reports on Philip Roth’s honorary degree from JTS.
  • Shabbat shalom.

    Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat

    Photo Credit: Reut Miryam Cohen
    Every Friday morning My Machberet presents an assortment of Jewish-interest links, primarily of the literary variety.

  • On my reading list: the latest issue of 614, the eZine from the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute. Issue theme: “Jewish Women and Comics.”
  • Something else I didn’t quite get to focus on (yet) this busy week: “a newly reissued short story from the under-appreciated late writer” Shirley Faessler that “revives Jewish Toronto of the 1930s.” On Tablet.
  • Also on Tablet: a long piece about the events that are at the heart of a play I’ve written about, Motti Lerner’s “The Admission.”
  • The latest New Yorker fiction podcast features Joyce Carol Oates on Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl.”
  • Brief post about the inaugural Seminar on Jewish Story.
  • Shabbat shalom!