American Jewish writers flourish, but Englishness and Jewishness seem mutually contradictory. Read the article byLINDA GRANT In 1937 the teenaged Irving Howe, future literary critic, excitedly unwrapped the very first edition of Partisan Review and read the short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” by Delmore Schwartz, written a couple of years earlier over a July weekend when…
Paul Beatty, Deborah Levy, Graeme Macrae Burnet, Ottessa Moshfegh, David Szalay, and Madeleine Thien have been named to the shortlist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. This is the third year that the prize has been open to writers of any nationality, and it finds the shortlist evenly split between two British, two…
“For the British-born novelist and long-standing American citizen Jonathan Wilson, “A Jew can never really be English” without “the abnegation of a certain aspect of your personality.” http://www.jbooks.com/interviews/index/IP_Weber_English.htm http://ase.tufts.edu/english/faculty/wilson.asp
Detailed discussion of The Matriarch by G. B.Stern from Kate MacDonald on her blog. There is something particularly enjoyable about a female villain in fiction, written for readers who expect women to be pure, perfect, and positive. I did a podcast miniseries in 2012 on jaw-droppingly awful, truly appalling female characters, all behaving badly. It was immense fun…
A recording of the whole day of the conference at Birkbeck College, September 11, 2013. http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2013/09/writing-jews-in-contemporary-britain/ Writing Jews in Contemporary Britain The workshop’s emphasis is on new and innovative work being undertaken in the field and is intended to provide a forum for presenting and analysing the most recent critical and theoretical approaches to British-Jewish…
Please be offended–be offended by the title, be offended by the behaviour of the characters, by the way the author plays with history, with the literary history of Russia and Yiddish culture, but be really offended by the way Stalin treated so many of the citizens of the Soviet Union. If you are the ending…
