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

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 

"Reviewers interpret, declare, dismiss and augment--creating the discussion space that books need in order to live. Reviews are the oxygen books breathe."--Joseph Mackin

Book Reviews: What We Talk About When We Talk About Books

The subtitle of the book under review (in which the missing adjective “Heterosexual” should modify the noun “Women”) implies a question: How does erotic romance for women differ from the equivalent genre for men? 

Read the entire review on nyjournalofbooks.com

Press release:

New York, NY, October 11, 2010 — Book lovers everywhere now have an exciting new resource for book reviews they can trust. The New York Journal of Books (www.nyjournalofbooks.com

“We intend to fill the gap that has resulted from the contraction, and in some cases the total elimination, of esteemed print book reviews,” says founder Ted Sturtz. “Unrestrained by page counts and printing costs, we are dedicated to delivering the most comprehensive detailed book reviews in North America written by credentialed reviewers whose knowledge, insight, voice, and measure of the written word permeate our book profiles.”

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My reviews are here: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/reviewer/david-cooper

David Cooper's review of Yael Hedaya's novel Eden compares Jessica Cohen's translation with Ms. Hedaya's original Hebrew. The novel features two marriages and a teenage girl all of whom are at-risk and in varied states of distress.