Settled in business class on a flight from L.A. to Israel, Micha, a successful 39 year-old ghostwriter, remains baffled by the all-expenses-paid invitation from his favorite Aunt Adella. Micha hadn’t seen her in 24 years, though etched into his memory is the first time he met Adella, when …
Wunderkind Israeli author Edgar Keret is an acquired taste. Brash, irreverent yet unabashedly funny, Keret imbues his anthology of thirty-two stories with darkly-comedic dystopian themes, some peppered with a touch of romance. Titled Autocorrect, Keret plumbs the “weltschmertz” (world…
What kept me reading Queen Esther, a confounding bizzaro novel by author John Irving is his inimitable skill to present a hodgepodge of unrelated topics ---the history of abortion, a dog named Hard Rain, wrestlers, antisemites, surrogacy, weird sex, circumcision, orphanages--- and then…
The debut work by author Menachem Kaiser, A Memoir of Plunder starts the same way as do many similar Holocaust memoirs; generations after WWll, a family member visits a shtetl in some part of Europe with intent to better understand his/her lost ancestors. Kaiser, however, pivots beyond the…
The Boy From The North Country penned by Bob Dylan’s doppelganger, author Sam Sussman is a deeply moving songbook to love. The narrative evokes myriad emotions---compassion, empathy, bliss, sorrow, hope --- exquisitely expressed in Sussman’s debut novel. If you’ve ever experienced…
