Tova Mirvis & Dani Shapiro: In Conversation
Two writers, both of whom left the orthodox fold, discuss the roles memory & imagination play in both fiction & memoir.
Two writers, both of whom left the orthodox fold, discuss the roles memory & imagination play in both fiction & memoir.
“Why does he always go to other countries?” she asks while chewing a pistachio. I stroke her head and say, “Don’t eat and talk at the same time, pumpkin, you can choke.” She swallows silently, then immediately asks, “Daddy, if you build buildings, what do you need a gun for?”
We asked experts and aficionados to recommend their top five books on timely and intriguing subjects—from trends in American Judaism to Jewish romance.
Much like the swashbuckling heroes of his popular novels, author Mark Helprin has led a life of great adventure. As a young man, Helprin served in the Israeli army, the Israeli air force and the British merchant navy, and he’s earned his living as an agricultural laborer, a factory worker, a military adviser, a Wall Street Journal columnist, a political speechwriter and much more.
Leonardo Padura’s Heretics is a remarkable book. Padura, who is certainly the most prominent of a small number of Jewish Cuban authors, might also be the most famous writer in Cuba today. Best known in this country for his Inspector Mario Conde detective series…
A conversation with novelist Michael Chabon can easily jump from Michael Jackson song lyrics to the history of spaceships. And while his love of all things quixotic can be a lot to digest, his intellectual openness and curiosity have resulted in a compelling and innovative body of work.
1936: He has been called “distinguished gentleman” and “filthy Jew”; the former is better, of course. Turn by turn he has been treated with civility or contempt.
The earliest comedy I remember with any clarity was created by a famous tragic clown, a circus performer whose painted mouth was perpetually turned down in a frown. Left out of the spotlight, he carried a sledgehammer and ran after the other clowns who wouldn’t have anything to do with him.
In the second place-winning story from the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation Short Fiction Contest, a Manhattan publicist returns to his sleepy Southern hometown and attempts to revitalize its Jewish life.
Many writers seem daunted by the autobiographical novel—ashamed to write of themselves, as if that were either self-indulgence or exploitation. And of course with James Joyce and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a paragon, many do not even dare to try. But Joyce didn’t frighten off E.L. Doctorow, who mined his own Depression-era childhood in New York for the 1986 National Book Award-winning World’s Fair.