Pre-Shabbat Jewish Literary Links

by Erika Dreifus on
2

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

  • Enjoy this remarkable account of “Two Days with I.B. Singer,” courtesy of Jewish Currents.
  • The Fig Tree Books blog launched a new feature: American Jewish Experience (AJE) Around the Web.
  • “Commenting on the [Jewish Quarterly/Wingate Prize] longlist, Director of the prize Rachel Lasserson says, ‘This generation of writers was born into stories of epic scale. Our longlist reflects their struggle to make sense of these huge stories.’”
  • With help from one of his children, Library Journal remembers author Howard Fast on the centenary of his birth.
  • And on my other blog this week: “Midrash on Happiness.”

    • Shabbat shalom.

    Wednesday’s Work-in-Progress: Midrash on Happiness

    by Erika Dreifus on
    7

    MidrashTriptych
    So, last week I asked which of three topics you’d all like to hear more about. This week, I respond to (some of the) popular demand. Several of you commented that you’d like to hear more about the fiction workshop I’ve enrolled in. And that’s the real focus of the piece.

    But we’ll also tiptoe into discussing “writing for free” here. And that’s because when you click on the image to try to read the text within it (the image does become legible when I click on it), you’ll see a piece that I’ve basically “written for free.”

    Allow me to backtrack.

    A few days after an in-workshop exercise generated the first draft of the text that you see in the image’s center column, a new idea came to me. (more…)

    Sunday Sentence

    by Erika Dreifus on
    4

    paley
    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.”

    Then Faith was ashamed to have wanted so much and so little all at the same time—to be so easily and personally satisfied in this terrible place, when everywhere vast public suffering rose in reeling waves from the round world’s nation-states—hung in the satellite-watched air and settled in no time at all into TV sets and newsrooms.

    Source: Grace Paley, “Midrash on Happiness” (discovered via the fiction-writing class I mentioned on Wednesday)