The Family Markowitz
10 best books like The Family Markowitz (Allegra Goodman): For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Jewish With Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice, The Romance Reader, Thirst, The Best American Short Stories 1997, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, Hope Will Find You: My Search for the Wisdom to Stop Waiting and Start Living, Seven Blessings, When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry, The Outside World
| Author | Nathan Englander |
| ISBN | 0375704434 |
A work of stunning authority and imagination - a book that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad, and that heralds the arrival of a profoundly gifted new storyteller.
Already sold in eight countries around the world, these nine energized, irreverent stories from Nathan Englander...
Jewish With Feeling: A Guide to Meaningful Jewish Practice
| Author | Zalman Schachter-Shalomi |
| ISBN | 1594481806 |
My biggest "beef" with the book is that it's not what I thought it was. It describes itself as "a guide to meaningful Jewish practice," but it's really an Introduction to Judaism book. It's not a tool for people already Jewishly-committed to deepen their practice. I was let down, but the first couple of...
| Author | Pearl Abraham |
| ISBN | 0704380390 |
Maybe there is something wrong with me. Maybe I need to stop telling my students how to write well. Because for the life of me I do not understand how people thought this book was "so well written." It was???
Was it the contrived and not at all believable dialog? Was it the very unlikable characters,...
| Author | Ken Kalfus |
| ISBN | 1571310185 |
A few quite good stories, reminiscent of Calvino and Borges, surrounded by some okay stories. And then I remembered, Calvino and Borges do a pretty good Calvino and Borges as well--so I'll read them instead. If you only read one story from this collection, though read "Night And Day You Are The One"
I'll...
| Author | Annie Proulx |
| ISBN | 0395798655 |
The preeminent short fiction series since 1915, The Best American Short Stories is the only annual that offers the finest works chosen by a distinguished best-selling guest editor. This year, E. Annie Proulx's selection includes dazzling stories by Tobias Wolff, Donald Hall, Cynthia Ozick, Robert...
| Author | Kath Weston |
| ISBN | 0231110936 |
This is a book about gay families and what it means to be a homosexual in the context of non-biological kinship, exclusively in San Francisco, ‘Gay Mecca’, in the USA. It is about how they live their lives in the face of rejection or even being disowned by blood relatives, which has led many to build...
| Author | Naomi Levy |
| ISBN | 0385531702 |
How can I get my life off hold? When will my life really begin? We all ask ourselves the same questions when we are struggling to move forward. As a rabbi, Naomi Levy frequently offered spiritual guidance to people seeking the answers. But when a doctor told her that her young daughter, Noa, had a fatal...
| Author | Ruchama King Feuerman |
| ISBN | 0312309163 |
The closed, secret world of matchmaking in contemporary Israel provides the titillating pivot for a story of uncommon proportions. In Ruchama King's skillful hands, Seven Blessings maps out the complicated lives of five expatriate women and men whose search for a soul mate, in many ways, mirrors...
When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry
| Author | Gal Beckerman |
| ISBN | 0618573097 |
A New Yorker Reviewers’ Favorites
“Beckerman recounts the historic trajectory of this grand assertion of human rights with passionate clarity and pellucid conviction.â€â€”Cynthia Ozick
AT THE END OF WORLD WAR II, NEARLY THREE MILLION JEWS WERE TRAPPED...
| Author | Tova Mirvis |
| ISBN | 1400075289 |
Tzippy Goldman was born for marriage. She and her mother had always assumed she’d graduate high school, be set up with the right boy, and have a beautiful wedding with white lace and pareve vanilla cream frosting. But at twenty-two, Tzippy’s fast approaching spinsterhood. She dreams of escape;...
| Author | Jonathan Rosen |
| ISBN | 0312424272 |
Deborah Green is a woman of passionate contradictions--a rabbi who craves goodness and surety while wrestling with her own desires and with the sorrow and pain she sees around her. Her life changes when she visits the hospital room of Henry Friedman, an older man who has attempted suicide. His parents...
Clarice Lissssssspector. It's on the back of the tongue, the name of the authoress from the wilds of Russia to Brazil. Soulstorm is a collection of stories about lives of her and her others. Her voice that was baby talk as we all learn to walk, and Russian and Portugese. A self concious translator Alexis...
| Author | Lara Vapnyar |
| ISBN | 1400033896 |
There Are Jews in My House is one of the most striking debuts of recent years. Tracing the lives and aspirations of Russians living in Moscow and Brooklyn, these poignant, sad and funny stories create a luminous new literary world.
In the title story, set during the Second World War, Galina,...
| Author | Joan Leegant |
| ISBN | 0393054764 |
This powerful, emotionally wrenching story opens in Jerusalem one steamy September when three Americans, unknown to each other, seek personal salvation in a foreign land. Yona Stern longs to make amends with her estranged sister who lives in a radical Jewish settlement. Mark Greenglass, a Talmud...
| Author | Erika Dreifus |
| ISBN | 0982708424 |
A high-ranking Nazi's wife and a Jewish doctor in prewar Berlin. A Jewish immigrant soldier and the German POWs he is assigned to supervise. A refugee returning to Europe for the first time and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. A son of survivors and technology's potential...
A Seat at the Table: A Novel of Forbidden Choices
| Author | Joshua Halberstam |
| ISBN | 1402208391 |
Lust - Tradition - Love - Faith - Self - Family
Elisha walks through Brooklyn with side curls tucked behind his ears and an oversized black hat on his head. He is a Chassidic Orthodox Jew and the son of a revered rabbi in whose footsteps he's expected to follow. When he leaves his insular world to...
| Author | Dara Horn |
| ISBN | 0393325261 |
A young woman's coming of age, a romantic love story, and a spiritual journey—each infused with the lessons of history.
In the Image is an extraordinary first novel illuminated by spiritual exploration, one that remembers "a language, a literature, a held hand, an entire world lived and...
| Author | Ayelet Tsabari |
| ISBN | 1443411957 |
Confident, original and humane, the stories in The Best Place on Earth are peopled with characters at the crossroads of nationalities, religions and communities: expatriates, travellers, immigrants and locals.
In the powerfully affecting opening story, “Tikkun,” a chance meeting...
| Author | Anzia Yezierska |
| ISBN | 0141180056 |
In stories that draw heavily on her own life, Anzia Yezierska portrays the immigrant's struggle to become a "real" American, in such stories as "Yekl," "Hunger," "The Fat of the Land," and "How I Found America." Set mostly in New York's Lower East Side, the stories brilliantly evoke the oppressive atmosphere...
| Author | J. Robert Lennon |
| ISBN | 1573226823 |
A plane falls from the sky as a couple argues in their yard, the whine of its engines drowning out their voices, parts of the craft shearing off the roof of their house. A few miles away, a young man waits for his girlfriend at the airport, while in a long-empty house, an old woman anticipates the return of...
| Author | Amos Oz |
| ISBN | 0701187964 |
'On the kibbutz it's hard to know. We're all supposed to be friends but very few really are.'
Amos Oz's compelling new fiction offers revelatory glimpses into the secrets and frustrations of the human heart, played out by a community of misfits united by political disagreement, intense dissatisfaction...
| Author | Sue Fishkoff |
| ISBN | 0805242651 |
Kosher? That means the rabbi blessed it, right? Not exactly. In this captivating account of a Bible-based practice that has grown into a multibillions-dollar industry, journalist Sue Fishkoff travels throughout America and to Shanghai, China, to find out who eats kosher food, who produces it, who...
Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction
This is really one of the best books on Jacques Lacan I have ever read, if not the best --and I have read several (including two by Bruce Fink and two by Slavoj Zizek). Grosz does a fantastic job placing all of Lacan's major ideas into their properly Freudian context, and for me shed significant new light...
| Author | Stewart O'Nan |
| ISBN | 0802138837 |
Stewart O'Nan's critically acclaimed novel Everyday People brings together the stories of the people of an African-American Pittsburgh neighborhood during one fateful week in the early fall of 1998. Vibrant, poignant, and brilliantly rendered, Everyday People is a lush, dramatic portrait that...
| Author | Elie Wiesel |
| ISBN | 0394439155 |
The first half of this collection of essays is just beautiful and definitely worth reading. The insight and profound truths were unsettling and thought-provoking. Unfortunately, when the book addresses the relationship between Israel and Palestine, the freshness of its language fell....
