Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Books
The Latest
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The Schmooze The Most Jewish True Crime Book Ever
Photo: Germain McMicking/Riverhead Books John Safran’s literary debut, “God’ll Cut You Down: The Tangled Tale of A White Supremacist, A Black Hustler, A Murder, and How I Lost Year in Mississippi,” arrived in the U.S. with momentum. The Australian Crime Writers Association had already named it the best true crime book of 2014. New York…
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Culture The Year of the Former Soviet Author
In the recently published memoir “A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka,” Lev Golinkin recounts the story of his family’s 1989 departure from the rapidly disintegrating Soviet Union. The Golinkins make their way to America, relying on the kindness of strangers; unsure of what they might find, they are guided largely by the…
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Culture ‘Jewish Oprah’ Carolyn Starman Hessel Turns Page From Jewish Book Council
(JTA) — When Carolyn Starman Hessel joined the New York-based Jewish Book Council in 1994 – at the request of friend Marsha Posner – she knew nothing about the publishing world. Since then, she’s been called the “Jewish Oprah” for her ability to help authors find audiences, and has enjoyed enormous clout and influence among…
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Culture Few Bright Spots for Jewish Books in 2014
It’s been a brutal year. As always, the world is in chaos. We hear about it every time we read the news, or turn on the television, or check our Facebook feeds. ISIS, Gaza, Ukraine, Ferguson, campus rape. Russian oligarchs have taken over New York City. Corporate citizens have taken over the government. Though the…
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The Schmooze AIDS Crisis Through a Comics Lens
Joyce Brabner/Mark Zingarelli “Joyce Brabner, best known as Harvey Pekar’s widow and collaborator, has released a graphic novel about early efforts in a New York gay community to fight the AIDS epidemic.” So began a recent Cleveland Plain-Dealer review of “Second Avenue Caper” (Hill & Wang, $22), a deeply moving and bitingly funny new graphic…
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The Schmooze Times Names Best Jewish Books of Year
Photo: Martyna Starosta (JTA) — The New York Times Book Review published its “100 Notable Books of 2014” on its website Tuesday and, not surprisingly, given the whole People of the Book moniker, a number of the fiction and nonfiction books highlighted this year are of Jewish interest. (The number of Jewish authors on general…
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Culture Some of Martin Amis’s Best Friends Are Jews. Really.
● The Zone of interest By Martin Amis Knopf, 320 pages, $26.95 Martin Amis’s new novel “The Zone of Interest,” which is set in post-Wannsee Auschwitz, is dedicated “[t]o those who survived and to those who did not; to the memory of Primo Levi… and to the memory of Paul Celan.” The dedication continues: “to…
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The Schmooze A Lost World in an Old Box of Film
In 2009, writer Glenn Kurtz was sifting through a closet in his parent’s Florida home when he discovered a reel of 16mm Kodachrome color film in a musty cardboard box that had belonged to his grandparents, David and Liza Kurtz. As prosperous Jewish American tourists, the Kurtz’s decided to take a six-week summer vacation through…
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