Notes from Around the Web: Literary Links for Shabbat

  • Thanks for the Center for Jewish History for posting a video of its May 18 “Evening with Philip Roth.”
  • On Wednesday, the Jewish Book Council’s Twitter Book Club convened to discuss David Bezmozgis’s novel, The Free World. Here’s the transcript.
  • Meantime, the JBC has announced the title for its next Twitter Book Club: Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial.
  • I was deeply saddened to read of the death of Zev Birger, a man described by The New York Times as “an official in the young state of Israel who later revived and then led the Jerusalem International Book Fair, turning it into a major event on the literary calendar,” from injuries he sustained when struck by a motorcycle. Mr. Birger, 85, was a Holocaust survivor.
  • David Kaufmann introduces us to Robert Pinsky’s Selected Poems.
  • The Forward presents its new website.
  • Hoping to spend some quality time this weekend with all of the wonderful links in this month’s Jewish Book Carnival.
  • Shabbat shalom!

    Jewish Book Carnival: June Edition

    My Machberet is proud to serve as June host for the Jewish Book Carnival, “a monthly event where bloggers who blog about Jewish books can meet, read, and comment on each others’ posts. The posts are hosted on one of the participant’s sites on the 15th of each month.”

    Herewith, this month’s Carnival posts:

    (more…)

    Notes from Around the Web: Literary Links for Shabbat

  • I was lucky enough to attend the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature awards ceremony last week, so I heard Deborah Lipstadt’s speech when it was delivered. But thanks to the Jewish Book Council, you can now read the text of Lipdstadt’s remarks, too.
  • A.B. Yehoshua praises Haifa and reminds me that I want to spend more time there.
  • Novelist Emily Barton writes about The Jazz Singer.
  • The Boston Bibliophile reviews and recommends The Last Brother, a novel by Nathacha Appanah (trans. Geoffrey Strachan). My own review was filed a couple of weeks ago; when it’s published, you’ll see that I’m 100 percent in agreement.
  • From the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center: ideas for social-justice book clubs.
  • Hurry up and read David Bezmozgis’s novel, The Free World, before next week’s Twitter Book Club session for it.
  • You may have heard that Edith Pearlman is the latest recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for short fiction. I’ve admired Pearlman’s work for a long time–I’m eager to read her newest book, Binocular Vision–and I was thrilled to see my own book discussed alongside hers (and Laura Furman’s) in this review by Rabbi Rachel Esserman.
  • Shabbat shalom!

    Notes from Around the Web: Literary Links for Shabbat

  • Josh Lambert examines “why a growing number of today’s young Jewish fiction writers…are grounding their novels in scholarly research.”
  • Author Hans Keilson has passed away.
  • “You are Jewish. Or you aren’t Jewish. Either way, you wonder about the relationship of Jews in the United States to Israel. Is it love/hate? Despair/hope? Anger/fondness? Fear/longing? You have your own thoughts on the matter. But you want to learn more.” (Reason #15 in Becky Tuch’s “21 Reasons Why You Should Read Dissent.”)
  • Check out The Forward‘s Summer Books section.
  • It’s been a busy week for my short-story collection, Quiet Americans.
  • Jeffrey Goldberg responds to a Scottish boycott of Israeli books.
  • Shabbat shalom!

    TBR: Forthcoming Books by Jewish Book NETWORK Authors

    One of the best parts of participating in the Jewish Book NETWORK‘s Meet the Author Program as one of the 2011-12 authors is the opportunity I had on Sunday evening to meet some fellow NETWORK authors whom I’ve admired for a long time. For example, I was able to tell Melissa Fay Greene how much I learned from The Temple Bombing; I finally met Joan Leegant; and, thanks to the privileges of alphabetical order, I sat right next to David Bezmozgis (whose novel, The Free World, I’m just starting to read on my Kindle).

    Many of the authors I had the good fortune to meet on Sunday–and others who may have shown up for one of the other sessions (this program is so large that not all of the authors can be accommodated in one evening)–are promoting books that have not yet been published.

    Here are just ten forthcoming titles that were discussed on Sunday and/or are featured in this year’s Jewish Book NETWORK guide that I’m especially eager to read. (And if you’re a book reviewer looking for summer/fall titles to review, maybe you’ll find some here to interest you as well.)

  • Ellen Feldman, Next to Love (Spiegel & Grau, July)
  • Martin Fletcher, The List (St. Martin’s, October)
  • Pam Jenoff, The Things We Cherished (Doubleday, July)
  • Jodi Kantor, The Obamas (Little, Brown, November)
  • Peter Orner, Love and Shame and Love (Little, Brown, November)
  • Alyson Richman, The Lost Wife (Berkley/Penguin, September)
  • Rebecca Rosenblum, The Big Dream (Biblioasis, September)
  • Philip Schultz, My Dyslexia (Norton, September)
  • Anna Solomon, The Little Bride (Riverhead, September)
  • Evelyn Toynton, The Oriental Wife (Other Press, July)
  • Two more things: Evan Fallenberg’s novel, When We Danced on Water, was released just last week. So, technically, it’s no longer “forthcoming.” But I wanted to give it (and Evan, an author I’d heard about but hadn’t met before Sunday) a shout-out here, anyway. I also have to mention Randy Susan Meyers’s The Murderer’s Daughters. Randy was there on Sunday to promote the paperback, and I told her very honestly that a copy is atop the stack on my nightstand right now.

    Reactions? Thoughts?