Posted by Naomi Firestone
Last year Peter Manseau made a splash as the non-Jewish author sweeping through the Jewish literary community with his work Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter (which happened to win the Jewish Book Council’s own National Jewish Book Award for Fiction). As the son of a priest and a nun, religion was clearly a fascinating subject for Manseau and, to further pursue his interest, he cofounded KillingtheBuddah.com. Killing the Buddah is “a religion magazine for people made anxious by churches, people embarrassed to be caught in the “spirituality” section of a bookstore, people both hostile and drawn to talk of God.”
Coming this July (July 15th to be exact) is a collection of essays that have sprung from the pages of Killing the Buddah titled Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatched From the Margins of Faith, written and collected by Jeff Sharlet, Peter Manseau, and the editors of Killing the Buddah (published by Beacon Press). With a set of essays that reflect the scope of religious diversity (including Orthodox Judaism, Roman Catholicism, Islam, Zen Buddhism, among others), the contributors examine what it means to believe or not believe in America in the 21st century.
Essays include:
Jew Like Me (Manseau)
Everybody has a Mother, and They All Die (Sharlet)
Sects and the City (Elizabeth Frankenberger)
Please Don’t Feed the Prophet (Daniel S. Brenner)
I Was a Prepubescent Messiah (Irina Reyn)
Dreading the Buzzer (Hasdai Westbrook)
Raised by Jews (Naomi Seidman)
The Only Jew for Miles (Gordon Haber)
This looks like it’s going to be a good one.
Categories: Jewish Books
Tagged: Believer Beware, Jeff Sharlet, Jewish Books, Killing the Buddah, Peter Manseau
Posted by Naomi Firestone
Thanks to Erika Dreifus (My Machberet) for the heads up about the National Yiddish Book Center’s upcoming Paper Bridge Summer Arts Festival. The event is from July 12-16, 2009 and will include three special, low-cost workshops. Pre-registration is required. Workshops include “Write Your Memories,” “Translate Your Memories,” and “Preserve Your Memories.”
Other events include Nahma Sandrow (Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater and God, Man and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation) on the life and times of the Yiddish Theater, as well as an exploration of the life and work of Yiddish playwright Jacob Gordin. Films, performances, and other lectures will also be held throughout the festival. For the complete list of events, please visit: http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/+calendar
Categories: Jewish Books
Tagged: Jewish Books, Nahma Sandrow, National Yiddish Book Center
Posted by Naomi Firestone
Tablet’s Sarah Weinman takes a look at the third Singer sibling, Esther Singer Kreitman, and her reissued novel: The Dance of the Demons: http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/books/unsung/
From the Feminist Press of CUNY’s website:
The Dance of the Demons is a major literary rediscovery. In her daring autobiographical novel, originally published in Yiddish as Der Sheydim Tanz in 1936, Kreitman vividly and lovingly depicts the world of Polish shtetls and Jewish Warsaw that many have come to know through the books of her famous literary brothers, Israel Joshua and Nobel-Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer. Replete with rabbis, yeshiva students, beggars, farmers, gangsters, seamstresses, and socialists, this world looks radically different through the eyes of a sister, who was I. B. Singer’s inspiration for the story “Yentl”.
More on this title can be found here: http://www.feministpress.org/index.php?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage-ask.tpl&product_id=348&category_id=7&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=40
Categories: Jewish Books
Tagged: Esther Singer Kreitman, Tablet, The Dance of the Demons
Always looking for new book recommendations? In addition to Book Seer (