Jewish Literary Links for Shabbat

  • Nathan Englander’s story in this week’s New Yorker is behind the paywall, but anyone can read this interview with Englander about the story (“What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” the title story in Englander’s forthcoming collection); Raymond Carver; and how Englander’s efforts in playwriting and translation have influenced his fiction.
  • Weekend reading: the latest issue of JewishFiction.net.
  • Glad to see a revival of Josh Lambert’s new books column on Tablet.
  • Four fun facts about my own year in Jewish books.
  • “The Book of Life’s Canadian Correspondent Anne Dublin interviews author and filmmaker David Bezmogis about his development as a writer and his new novel The Free World.”
  • There is so much great stuff on Barbara Krasner’s “Whole Megillah” site (“the writer’s resource for Jewish-themed children’s books”) that I’m just going to send you over to the home page.
  • Israeli author Moshe Sakal was thrown off a literary panel in France a few days ago when a Palestinian poet refused to share the stage with him. Nice, n’est-ce pas? The event has received appallingly little attention–and the news is traveling slowly at that–but I’ve been able to track down some live-blogging coverage (in French.) Meantime, I’ve also found the author’s “Writing Rules,” apparently published in connection with his University of Iowa International Writers Program affiliation this fall.
  • Shabbat shalom!