Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of books and literature, including both non-fictional and fictional works.
When Michael Feinstein was in his 20s, he had the good fortune to work as an assistant and archivist for the great Ira Gershwin, who, with his brother George, wrote some of the greatest and most beloved songs in American history. Now a beloved singer in his own right, Feinstein spoke with the Forward about…
My new novel, “The Middlesteins,” follows the lives of the titular suburban Chicago Jewish family, whose matriarch is obsessed with food, a thing with which I am also very much interested in myself. Your relationship with food is often informed by a parent’s relationship with it, so I decided to go to one of the…
A Messenger Comes By Rachel Tzvia Back Singing Horse Press, 110 Pages, $15 Mourning propels us. We are, none of us, immune. It is the first thing children fear: loss — of a parent, a friend, a sibling, a grandparent — and the first lie we tell them, or half-truth we impart, as parents, promising,…
The Wine of Solitude By Irène Némirovsky Vintage, 256 pages. $15 When we first meet Hélène Karol, she is an 8-year-old girl growing up in Ukraine. She dislikes, and is disliked by, her mother, an exceedingly unhappy member of the morally and financially bankrupt bourgeoisie. Hélène loves and admires her father, who doesn’t care much…
The Gershwins and Me By Michael Feinstein Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $45 George Gershwin is widely, and rightly, regarded as a quintessentially American character. This isn’t merely because of the way his music sounds; while the music he wrote is unmistakably American, the same can be said for any number of other American composers…
When A.M. Homes and I sat down to lunch at Buvette, a packed cafe on Grove Street near her home in New York City’s West Village, to discuss her new novel, “May We Be Forgiven,” she referred to it as “a midlife coming-of-age novel.” That may make her book sound sweet or languorous, but it…
Jami Attenberg’s most recent novel, “The Middlesteins,” is now available. Her other books include: “Instant Love,” “The Kept Man” and “The Melting Season.” Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit: I have…
I came from such an assimilated family that our clam chowder was Campbell’s. Nevertheless, I was raised with certain traditions. There was the “No Slacks on Yom Kippur” rule and the “Seder at Aunt Sara and Uncle George’s.” If my family had settled in Dallas or Indianapolis, we might have easily melded into America, but…
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