Meg Wolitzer writes in spaces where women’s emotions run high: She has tackled wives overshadowed by their husbands, as well as career woman who became stay-at-home moms. In her new novel, “The Uncoupling” (Riverhead), she investigates sex by creating characters who stop having it altogether when a spell enchants their suburb. The magic begins —…
Matthew Sharpe is the author of a story collection and four novels. His most recent is “You Were Wrong,” published last summer by Bloomsbury USA. He spoke to Allison Yarrow about writing of a suburban house, his Jewish sensibility and Kafka’s inexplicit religious authority. Listen to the podcast below and subscribe to Forward podcasts on…
From the Borscht Belt to poop jokes, Jewish comedy comes in many forms, and Michael Showalter has a little of both in his repertoire. The comedian, who wrote and starred in the films “The Baxter” and “Wet Hot American Summer,” has lent his many gifts to his new “humoir,” “Mr. Funny Pants” (Grand Central Publishing),…
Sharon Salzberg co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Mass., and has taught spirituality and meditation for 35 years. By the time she was 16, she had lived in five different family configurations, and each had ended in trauma. Feeling alone led her to India when she was 18. There she discovered the Buddhist teachings…
Thirty-two-year-old writer and humorist Sloane Crosley has published two books of essays on topics ranging from what not to do in the office (bake cookies shaped like the boss) to how to attend an Alaskan wedding (armed with the definition of “scat”; it means “bear feces”). In this Yid Lit Podcast, she talks about her…
They mess you up, your siblings. That’s one takeaway from a new book of essays on the subject of brothers and sisters, “Freud’s Blind Spot,” edited by Elisa Albert. In it, writers dissect what scientists call the horizontal relationships that so shape us but are often ignored. Etgar Keret, Steve Almond and Lauren Grodstein are…
If you pay for a membership to Netflix or Zipcar, if you’ve gone to a clothing swap, a potluck or given or gotten anything from Craigslist, you’re participating in “collaborative consumption,” the phenomenon of sharing, swapping, borrowing and lending that Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers write in their new book, “What’s Mine is Yours” (Harper…
Contrary to the title of Rebecca Traister’s new book, “Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women,” there’s quite a bit of crying in it: everyone from Sarah Palin to Gloria Steinem, to Traister herself show their emotions in this raw, narrative look at the 2008 race to the presidency from…
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