arts & entertainment
Page Turners from page 57
"To read is to voyag
through time."
- Carl Sa
of New Yorker film critic David Denby)
uses letters, emails, memos, legal filings
and depositions (most from the young,
female, French Jewish lawyer represent-
ing the wife).
Jewish author M.J. Rose has made a
name for herself with her "reincarna-
tion" novels (The Book of Lost Fragrances,
Seduction). In The Collector of Dying
Breaths (Atria), she alternates between
16th-century and 21st-century France as
a modern-day woman seeks to unlock
Catherine de Medici's perfumer's secret
to immortality.
The World of Rae English (Black
Lawrence Press), by U-M grad Lucy
Rosenthal, is set in the Mad Men era
and tells the story of a young woman
who is recovering from a marriage to a
disgraced politician; abandoning New
York for the University of Iowa's Writers
Workshop, she hopes to find herself as
a writer and seek romance in the heart-
land.
In Daniel Silva's new thriller, The
Heist (Harper; July 15), Israeli art
restorer and occasional spy Gabriel
Allon searches for a stolen masterpiece
by Caravaggio.
Maddy Freed, an up-and-coming
actress, and Steven Weller, her older, pos-
sibly closeted, mega-successful producer
husband, are the main characters in Amy
Sohn's new novel, The Actress (Simon
and Schuster; July 1), which explores the
price of ambition, the treachery of love
and the roles we all play.
A couple plan for low-key nuptials
and get anything but in A Wedding
in Provence (Ballantine), Ellen
Sussman's novel of love, forgiveness
and trust set among the beaches and
vineyards of southern France.
In Love and Treasure (Knopf),
Ayelet Waldman, inspired by the
story of the Hungarian Gold Train in
World War II, offers a suspenseful his-
torical novel and love story that moves
between eras as a granddaughter hon-
ors her grandfather's life.
Michael Wex's (the nonfiction Born
to Kvetch) first novel, Shlepping the
Exile (St. Martin's Press), is a satiric
take on a tale about a Chasidic boy
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June 26 • 2014
and his refugee parents making new lives
in the Canadian Rockies.
In Jennifer Weiner's All Fall Down
(Atria), Allison Weiss has a handsome
husband, an adorable little girl, a job she
loves and a big house in the suburbs.
On the other hand, the prescription
medicine her doctors give her to make it
through the day (her husband is becom-
ing distant, her daughter is acting out,
her father has early Alzheimer's and her
mother can barely cope) may be turning
into her biggest problem of all.
In The Belief in Angels (She Writes
Press), by J. Dylan Yates, two wounded
souls, Jules Finn (who grew up in a cha-
otic hippie household and has recently
lost her brother) and her grandfather
Samuel Trautman (an Orthodox Jew who
survived the Ukrainian pogroms of the
1920s as well as a World War II death
camp) undergo experiences that could
only be explained as Divine intervention.
Set on the eve of the Second World
War, The Last Train to Paris (Europa
Editions), by Michele Zackheim, tells
of a half-Jewish American reporter in
Paris who undertakes an assignment in
the Berlin press office and is forced to
grapple with her hidden identity as Jew.
Short Storia
Molly Antopol's debut collection, The
UnAmericans (W.W. Norton), moving
from the U.S. to Israel to Soviet Russia
and back again, explores characters
shaped by the forces of history: an
actor phased out of Hollywood for his
Communist ties, an Israeli soldier who
comes of age when his brother is maimed
on their communal farm, a gallerist
who begins smuggling paintings out
of Moscow and curating underground
shows in her Jerusalem home.
Israeli Knesset member Ruth
Calderon, who has a doctorate in
Talmud, retells talmudic stories as
imaginative fiction in A Bride for One
Night: Talmud Tales (Jewish Publication
Society), translated into English by Ilana
Kurshan.
In Many Seconds into the Future: Ten
Stories (Texas Tech University Press),
John J. Clayton focuses on family as the
"Books may well be
the only true magic."
- Alice Hoffman
N
characters — most of them Jewish —
grapple with questions of living, dying,
loving and worshiping.
Actor/writer B.J. Novak's (The
Office) well-reviewed collection of short
stories, One More Thing: Stories and
Other Stories (Knopf), mined from
his standup routines and riffing on
everything from sex robots to the ghost
of Mark Twain, imagines a blind date
with a warlord, a Comedy Central TV
roast of Nelson Mandela and a mortify-
ing misunderstanding between novelist
John Grisham and his new editor. The
Harvard graduate's father co-edited The
Big Book of Jewish Humor.
Last year's 100th anniversary of New
York City's Grand Central Terminal
was the impetus for Grand Central:
Original Stories of Postwar Love and
Reunion (Berkley trade paperback;
July 1), which gathers stories from 10
writers who, inspired by the iconic New
York landmark, have created their own
stories, set on the same day just after
the end of World War II in a time of
hope, uncertainty, change and renewal.
Jewish authors include Pam Jenoff and
Alyson Richman.
Menwira
The Tailors of Tomaszow (Texas Tech
University Press), a "collective memoir"
by Rena Margulies Chernoff and Alan
Chernoff, recalls the annihilated Jewish
community of Tomaszow-Mazowiecki,
Poland, in a narrative told by one of the
younger survivors of the Holocaust, as
well as through firsthand accounts of
other Tomaszow survivors.
Avery Corman, who wrote Kramer
vs. Kramer and Oh, God!, is out with a
new memoir, My Old Neighborhood
Remembered (Barricade Books),
an urban history of growing up in
the Bronx of the 1940s and '50s in a
neighborhood culture that has since
vanished.
"Think before
you speak. Read
before you think."
- Fran Lebowitz 16P
Graphic
In Can't We Talk About Something
More Pleasant? (Bloomsbury U.S.A.),
the New Yorker's Roz Chast offers a
prickly but funny graphic memoir
about dealing with her aging parents.
Liana Finck's A Bintel Brief: Love
and Longing in Old New York (Ecco)
turns the popular advice column for
new immigrants that appeared in the
Yiddish Forward newspaper into a non-
fiction graphic novel.
Photo- Dock
In Fictitious Dishes: An Album
of Literature's Most Memorable
Meals (HarperCollins), author Dinah
Fried photographs 50 re-creations of
literature's most famous meals from
contemporary and classic novels.
Poet/ q
In her latest volume, And Short the
Season (W.W. Norton), former U.S.
poet laureate Maxine Kumin, who died
earlier this year, focuses on the natural
world. Jewish themes are sometimes
reflected in her work.
The Wherewithal (W. W. Norton)
is Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Philip
Schultz's new novel written in verse,
about a young man hiding in a San
Francisco basement to avoid the
Vietnam War, who translates his
mother's World War II wartime diaries
of Poland.
Deborah Feldman, author of the
best-selling Unorthodox, follows up
with Exodus: A Memoir (Blue Rider
Press), continuing her narrative of her
life story since she rejected the clois-
tered Satmar community in which she
was raised; similarly, Leah Vincent, in
Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After
My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood (Nan A.
Talese), writes about her promiscuous
and self-destructive spiral after being
cast out of her ultra-Orthodox Jewish
family.
In The Late Starters Orchestra
(Algonquin), former New York Times
reporter Ari L. Goldman (The Search
for God at Harvard) guides readers
through his midlife journey as he takes
up the cello after 25 years.
Pilgrim: Risking the Life I Have to
Find the Faith I Seek (Hudson Street
Press), by Lee Kravitz, is a memoir of
the author's mission to rediscover his
lost spirituality; he "samples" the tradi-
tions of many religions as he seeks to
fulfill his yearnings for a contemplative
life connected with God.
Actress Lee Grant, born Lyova Haskell
Rosenthal, details her experiences in
I Said Yes to Everything (Blue Rider
Press; July 8) — from the New York the-
ater scene of the '50s to landing on the
Hollywood blacklist to her return to star-
dom and star-studded parties in 1970s
Malibu.