My examiner.com article about my NY Journal of Books reviews of Dan Chaon's Stay Awake and Nikanor Teratologen's Assisted Living

via examiner.com

2011 Jewish fiction and poetry books   (a list of Jewish fiction and poetry books I reviewed in the past year).

“Your wife is killed by a cashew (anaphylactic shock), but there isn't time to grieve because your toddler son is always at your heels—wanting to be fed, to be played with, or to sleep next to you all night long. A change of pace seems necessary, so you decide to visit your parents in order to attend your twenty-year high school reunion. What begins as a weekend getaway quickly becomes a theater for dealing with the past—a past that you will have to re-imagine in order to have any hope of a future for you and your son.”--Mark Yakish, A Meaning for Wife

Read the rest of my review in New York Journal of Books

New York Jewish fiction writer Susan Daitch's third novel Paper Conspiracies, which was published last week by City Lights Books, takes an indirect approach to late Nineteenth Century France's Dreyfus Affair by way of peripheral minor actors in the scandal and via cinema pioneer Georges Mèliés' contemporaneous dramtized documentary film L'affaire Dreyfus . The novel's six sections alternate between 1990s New York and Paris in the 1890s, 1930s, and 1968.

In my New York Journal of Books review of the novel I enthusiastically recommend the book "to fans of highbrow, erudite historical fiction. Readers who enjoy the novels of Umberto Eco, for example, will probably also enjoy those of Ms. Daitch.” I also draw an analogy between late Nineteenth Century French anti-Semitism and Twentyfirst Century American Islamophobia. 

In my New York Journal of Books review I describe the book as  “. . . a plot-driven novel conveyed in crisp, descriptive, and thought-provoking prose via an engagingly intelligent third-person narrator. . . . an auspicious debut” and recommend it to both adult and precocious young adult readers.  via examiner.com

In my New York Journal of Books review I quote Ms. Miller, "Every new piece of information keeps me on the road to the ever-expanding possibility of the quest, a quest that in the end will still yield only partial knowledge--and will never give me, return to me, those past lives." Ms. Miller, a retired CUNY Graduate Center English and Comparative Literature professor, is an appealing prose stylist, but because of its focus on the genalogical search process this book will mostly appeal to genealogy buffs in general and Jewish genealogy buffs in particular.

Continue reading on Examiner.com 

“Looking for an anthology of erotic texts to accompany masturbation? Look elsewhere.”

"Aspiring fiction writers who would rather not write sex scenes but whose plots or character development require that they do, may find this book a useful guide, especially if they share its author’s taste in literature in general and erotic literature in particular."

via nyjournalofbooks.com