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Orders are fulfilled by Amazon.com Net proceeds are donated to tzedakah		Novels and Fiction (click on a listing for more information, to see the cover art, or to purchase it) The World to Come A novel by Dara Horn January 2006, WW Norton In 2005, a million-dollar painting, a sketch for "Over Vitebsk" by Marc Chagall, is stolen from a museum - during a singles' cocktail hour. The unlikely thief is Benjamin Ziskind, a lonely former child-prodigy who writes questions for quiz shows, and who believes the painting belongs to his family. Ben tries to evade the police while he seeks out the truth of how the painting got to the museum - whether the "original" is really a forgery - and whether his twin sister, an artist, can create a successful forgery to take its place. As the story unfolds - with the delicacy and complexity of origami - we are brought back to the 1920s in Soviet Russia, where Marc Chagall taught art to orphaned Jewish boys. There, Chagall befriended the great Yiddish novelist known by the pseudonym "Der Nister," the Hidden One. And there the story of the painting begins, carrying with it not only a hidden fable by the Hidden One, but also the story of the Ziskind family - from Russia to New Jersey and Vietnam. Dara Horn interweaves mystery, romance, folklore, theology, history, and scripture into a spellbinding modern tale. She brings us on a breathtaking collision course of past, present, and future - revealing both the ordinariness and the beauty of "the world to come." Nestling stories within stories, this is a novel of remarkable clarity and deep inner meaning. Click the book cover above to read more. Absurdistan A Novel by Gary Shteyngart May 2006. From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Misha Vainberg, the rich, arrogant and very funny hero of Shteyngart's follow-up to The Russian Debutante's Handbook, compares himself early on to Prince Myshkin from Dostoyevski's The Idiot: "Like the prince, I am something of a holy fool... an innocent surrounded by schemers." Readers will more likely note his striking resemblance to John Kennedy Toole's Ignatius Reilly. A "sophisticate and a melancholic," Misha is an obese 30-year-old Russian heir to a post-Soviet fortune. After living in the Midwest and New York City for 12 years, he considers himself "an American impounded in a Russian body." But his father in St. Petersburg has killed an Oklahoma businessman and then turned up dead himself, and Misha, trying to leave Petersburg after the funeral, is denied a visa to the United States. The novel is written as his appeal, "a love letter and also a plea," to the Immigration and Naturalization Service to allow him to return to the States, which lovingly and hilariously follows Misha's attempt to secure a bogus Belgian passport in the tiny post-Soviet country of Absurdistan. Along the way, Shteyngart's graphic, slapstick satire portrays the American dream as experienced by hungry newborn democracies, and covers everything from crony capitalism to multiculturalism. It's also a love story. Misha is in love with New York City and with Rouenna Sales, his "giant multicultural swallow" from the South Bronx, despite the pain they have caused him: a botched bris performed on Misha at age 18 by New York City's Hasid-run Mitzvah Mobile, and Rouenna running off with his stateside rival (and Shteyngart's doppelganger), Jerry Shteynfarb (author of "The Russian Arriviste's Hand Job") while Misha is stuck in Russia. The ruling class of Absurdistan is in love with the corrupt American company Halliburton, which is helping the rulers in a civil war in order to defraud the U.S. government. Halliburton, in turn, is in love with Absurdistan for the money it plans to make rebuilding Absurdistan's "inferstructure" and for the plentiful hookers who spend their nights and days by hotel pools looking for "Golly Burton" employees to service. And everyone is in love with America-or at least its money. Everything in Shteyngart's frustrated world-characters, countries, landscapes-strives for U.S.-style culture and prosperity, a quest that gives shape to the melancholy and hysteria of Shteyngart's Russia. Extending allegorical tentacles back to the Cold War and forward to the War on Terror, Shteyngart piles on plots, characters and flashbacks without losing any of the novel's madcap momentum, and the novel builds to a frantic pitch before coming to a breathless halt on the day before 9/11. The result is a sendup of American values abroad and a complex, sympathetic protagonist worthy of comparison to America's enduring literary heroes. Click the book cover above to read more. SEPTEMBER 2006 Also available on Audio CD The Boy in the Striped Pajamas A novel by John Boyne September 2006. David Fickling Books Readers of MyJewishBooks.com will remember this as a book that was so hot, that we redirected readers to a British bookstore to get this book in 2005. Now for Fall 2006, it is available in the USA Don't let anyone tell you about this book. It is best read on your own, so you can discover it for yourself. Berlin 1942 When Bruno returns home from school one day, he discovers that his belongings are being packed in crates. His father has received a promotion and the family must move from their home to a new house far far away, where there is no one to play with and nothing to do. A tall fence running alongside stretches as far as the eye can see and cuts him off from the strange people he can see in the distance. But Bruno longs to be an explorer and decides that there must be more to this desolate new place than meets the eye. While exploring his new environment, he meets another boy whose life and circumstances are very different to his own, and their meeting results in a friendship that has devastating consequences. Click the book cover to read more. Somewhere in Germany A Novel by Stefanie Zweig, Marlies Comjean September 2006. David Fickling Books From Publishers Weekly. Published in Germany in 1996, this autobiographical sequel to Zweig's noteworthy Nowhere in Africa follows the Redlichs as they return to Germany in 1947 after 10 years in exile from National Socialism on a Kenyan farm. Walter is so desperate to practice law again that he uproots his complaining wife, Jettel, his clever, nurturing daughter, Regina, and baby Max to Frankfurt, where gentiles either make snide anti-Semitic comments or claim that they saved Jews and used to have many Jewish friends. Zweig has a deft hand with telling anecdotes. A gas company employee and his wife are evicted when they lack the necessary clout to defend themselves against political charges. In the deprivations of postwar Frankfurt, steel helmets become saucepans and a care package containing American foodstuffs elicits joyful tears. Also vividly described are bighearted Walter's staunch belief in the existence of "the decent German" and budding journalist Regina's meeting with Otto Frank, who tells her how much she reminds him of his daughter, Anne. Although its setting isn't the exotic Kenya of the original novel and Comjean's translation is stiff and prolix, this is a worthy meditation on homelessness, exile and belonging. Click the book cover to read more. Also... if you want to see the film: The Righteous Men by Sam Bourne September 1, 2006. William Morrow. From Booklist: Our pop-cultural obsession with The Da Vinci Code continues to breed more religious-historical thrillers. Bourne's novel, which draws its inspiration from the Jewish rather than the Christian tradition, is one of the better ones. Sent to cover two seemingly unrelated murders--of a New York City pimp and a Montana militiaman--ambitious journalist Will Monroe discovers something that piques his interest: both victims had a secret. Despite brutal deeds in life, each had done extraordinary good. Then Monroe's wife is kidnapped. His search for her takes him into the Hasidic Jewish community of Crown Heights in Brooklyn, where he first hears the legend of the 36 righteous men whose selfless acts allow the rest of us to exist--and learns that they are being systematically killed. Always twisting and turning, Bourne's novel takes readers on a dramatic, full-throttle adventure, which ultimately offers a timely spin on the question, "Can the end ever justify the means?" Click the book cover to read more. (95,000 copies in the first printing!) The Littlest Hitler Stories by Ryan Boudinot September 2006. Counterpoint / Perseus In the title story, a little boy dresses as Hitler for Halloween. The girl who he fancies dresses as Anne Frank. Ummm. O. Henry never thought up stories like these. In another story, teens in the future must kill their parents (preferably with ice picks) to get accepted into the colleges of their choice. Is this the influence of Yaddo. Such are the stories of Mr. Boudinit (author, and employee at Amazon.com) Click the book cover to read more. The SCar of David A Novel by Susan Abulhawa FALL 2006. NewSouthBooks.com Set within one of the 20th century's most intractable political conflicts, The Scar of David is historical fiction about a Palestinian family from the village of Ein Hod, which was emptied of its inhabitants by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948. Three massacres and two major wars provide the foundation to a love story and the eventual reunion of family members lost to each other for two decades. This story reveals Palestinians with the undaunted will to take their place among the nations as human beings, worthy of human rights, and the basic dignity of heritage. Click the book cover to read more. THE ONE FROM THE OTHER A BERNIE GUNTHER NOVEL by Philip Kerr FALL 2006. Putnam Germany, 1949: Amid the chaos of defeat, it's a place of dirty deals, rampant greed, fleeing Nazis, and all the intrigue and deceit readers have come to expect from this immensely talented thriller writer. In The One from the Other, Hitler's legacy lives on. For Bernie Gunther, Berlin has become too dangerous, and he now works as a private detective in Munich. Business is slow and his funds are dwindling when a woman hires him to investigate her husband's disappearance. No, she doesn't want him back-he's a war criminal. She merely wants confirmation that he is dead. It's a simple job, but in postwar Germany, nothing is simple-nothing is what it appears to be. Accepting the case,Bernie takes on far more than he'd bargained for, and before long, he is on the run, facing enemies from every side. Click the book cover to read more. DISOBEDIENCE A novel By NAOMI ALDERMAN September 2006, Simon and Schuster / Touchstone From Publishers Weekly: Alderman draws on her Orthodox Jewish upbringing and current life in Hendon, England, for her entertaining debut, which won the Orange Prize for New Writers after it was published in the U.K. in March. In writing about the inhabitants of this small, gossipy society, Alderman cleverly uses a slightly sinister, omniscient "we" to represent a community that speaks with one voice, and her descriptions of Orthodox customs are richly embroidered. Alternating with this perspective is the first-person narrative of Ronit Krushka, a woman who has left the community and is now a financial analyst in New York. After the death of her estranged father, a powerful rabbi, Ronit returns to England to mourn her father and to confront her past, including a female lover. But Ronit's shock that an Orthodox lesbian would marry a man rings false, as does her casually condescending attitude toward the community. By the time of the theatrical, unrealistic climax, Ronit's struggle between religious and secular imperatives gets reduced to clich� ("all we have, in the end, are the choices we make"), but Ronit works well as a vehicle for the opinion that even the most alienated New York Judaism is preferable to the English version, where "the Jewish fear of being noticed and the natural British reticence interact." Click the book cover to read more. WIDE AWAKE A Novel by David Levithan September 2006, Knopf Ages 9 and up From Booklist In Boy Meets Boy (2003), Levithan created a town where being gay is no big thing. In his latest, he imagines a future America--after the Reign of Fear, after the Greater Depression, the War to End All Wars, the Jesus Revolution, and the Prada Riots. Living in this not quite but almost believable America are Duncan and his boyfriend, Jimmy, who start out the book rejoicing that Abe Stein, both gay and Jewish, has been elected president. Unsurprisingly, however, the governor of Kansas demands a recount, causing both Stein supporters and Stein haters to travel en masse to Kansas. Into this politically charged atmosphere go Duncan and Jimmy, who experience what proves to be a life-changing journey for them and their country. Levithan is best when he's focused on the two nuanced teenagers. Duncan's first-person narration--vulnerable, insecure, caring--absolutely sings, and his relationship with the outspoken Jimmy has all the awkwardness and intensity of first love. Clearly responding to current politics, Levithan's vision of the future occasionally dips into heavy-handed moralizing, but politics are so well integrated and thought-provoking that those moments are forgivable. As much about love as about politics, Levithan's latest reaches out to shake readers awake, showing them how each person's life touches another, and another, until ultimately history is made. Click the book cover to read more. PHILIP ROTH NOVELS 1973-1977 The Great American Novel (1973) My Life as a Man (1974) The Professor of Desire (1977) Edited By ROSS Miller, Univ of Connecticut 2006, The Library of America This third volume in The Library of America's definitive edition of Philip Roth's collected works presents three markedly different novels that together trace a crucial period in the bold evolution of one of America's indispensable novelists. Surely the funniest novel ever written about baseball, The Great American Novel (1973) turns our national pastime into unfettered picaresque farce. The cast of improbable characters includes: Gil Gamesh, the pitcher who actually tried to kill the umpire; John Baal, the ex-con first baseman, "The Babe Ruth of the Big House," who never hit a home run sober; and the House Un-American Activities Committee. My Life as a Man (1974), Roth's most blistering novel, presents the treacherous world of Strindberg nearly a century later in the story of a fierce marital tragedy of obsession and blindness and desperate need. The Professor of Desire (1977)-the novel that prompted Milan Kundera to proclaim Roth "a great historian of modern eroticism"-follows an adventurous man of intelligence and feeling into and out of the tempting wilderness of erotic possibility. Click the book cover to read more. Time out... are you telling me that the Jews are responsible for Hanibal Lecter the Cannibal? Well... it seems as if his mentor growing up was Jewish, until the Nazi's murdered him... and... Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris December 2006, Delacorte Press From Publishers Weekly: Twenty-five years after Hannibal Lecter, a cross between Professor Moriarty and Jack the Ripper, first invaded the imaginations of countless readers worldwide in Red Dragon, bestseller Harris has crafted an unmemorable prequel that's intended to explain the origins of Lecter's evil. Fans of Harris's previous Lecter novel, Hannibal (1999), already know the major trauma that transformed the young Lecter's murder of his beloved younger sister, Mischa, during WWII&mdashwhich the author describes in more grisly detail. Lecter also has an unusual love interest, his uncle's Japanese wife, Lady Murasaki, but the bulk of the narrative focuses on Lecter's quest for revenge on those he holds responsible for Mischa's death. Unfortunately, the prose and plotting lack the suspenseful power of Red Dragon or The Silence of the Lambs, and will leave many feeling that with such a masterful monster as Lecter, less is more. . Click the book cover to read more. GOLEM SONG A novel By Marc Estrin November 2006, Unbridled By some incalculable force of human attraction, Alan Krieger has two lovers. A man of his girth and compulsion, a man who cannot stop talking, a man to whom the entire world seems completely irrational, should not take one woman for granted, much less two. Companions who can tolerate his anger, his obsessions, and his antic clowning all at the same time are not easy to come by. But when the thought arises in Alan that he's been "chosen" to deliver Jewish America from the threat of Anti-Semitism, then all his connections to reality fall away, including those to his lovers and his family. Recalling the folktale of the Golem - the Frankensteinian giant of clay that saved the Jews in 16th Century Prague - Alan lays out a plan of attack and then sets to making the most outrageous of preparations in the culture wars. Like each of the acclaimed Estrin novels that have preceded it, Golem Song is a brilliant, allusive, manic, and wildly comic approach to some of the most serious and difficult cultural questions of our time. Click the book cover to read more. Goy Crazy A novel by Melissa Schorr September 2006. Hyperion A young adult novel HILARIOUS NOVEL ABOUT FALLING FOR THE WRONG GOY Rachel Lowenstein can't help it. She's got a massive crush on a goy: Luke Christensen, the gorgeous star of the basketball team at St. Joseph's prep. But as the name implies, he's not exactly in Rachel's tribe. Rachel just knows her parents would never approve. Then Rachel's Jewish grandmother issues a stern edict--"Don't go with the goyim!"-- sealing Rachel's fate and presenting her with a serious dilemma. Everyone's got an opinion-from her annoying neighbor Howard to her newly social-climbing best friend. Should Rachel follow her heart and turn her back on her faith? Or should she heed her family's advice and try and find a nice Jewish boy? With an unforgettable cast of characters and razor-sharp wit, Melissa Schorr's debut novel is an engaging comedy about a girl's decision to go goy crazy. Click the book cover to read more. The Adventures of Rabbi Harvey A Graphic Novel of Jewish Wisdom and Wit in the Wild West By Steve Sheinkin Fall 2006. Jewish Lights A fresh look at Jewish folktales-wise, witty, hilarious After finishing school in New York, Rabbi Harvey traveled west in search of adventure and, hopefully, work as a rabbi. His journey took him to Elk Spring, Colorado, a small town in the Rocky Mountains. When he managed to outwit the ruthless gang that had been ruling Elk Spring, the people invited Harvey to stay on as the town's rabbi. In Harvey's adventures in Elk Spring, he settles disputes, tricks criminals into confessing, and offers unsolicited bits of Talmudic insight and Hasidic wisdom. Each story presents Harvey with a unique challenge-from convincing a child that he is not actually a chicken, to retrieving stolen money from a sweet-faced bubbe gone bad. Like any good collection of Jewish folktales, these stories contain layers of humor and timeless wisdom that will entertain, teach and, especially, make you laugh. Click the book cover to read more. SECRETLY INSIDE A NOVEL BY HANS WARREN May 2006. University of Wisconsin Press. In English for the first time, this is a translation of the 1975 Dutch best seller, STEEN DER HULP, but the late Hans Warren, one of Holland's best known writers and diarists (he kept a diary from 1939 - 2001). This novel will have a film based on it in 2006 from Laika Films, directed by Bavo Defurne, the Belgian filmmaker. Ed is a Jew in hiding in Nazi occupied Holland. In Zeeland, he is taken in by some farmers. But perhaps the Van't Westeindes are not as friendly as the seem. Camiel, the son of the family, is mourning the suicide of his friend, a German soldier. Ed is interested in Camiel, while Mariete, the family's daughter is interested romantically in Ed. She is quite unstable. The farmhouse that is Ed's sanctuary slowly becomes his prison. Click the book cover above to read more. Conversation with Spinoza A Cobweb Novel (Writings from an Unbound Europe) by Goce Smilevski, Filip Korzenski (Translator) MAY 2006. Northwestern University Press. Prizing ideas above all else, radical thinker Baruch Spinoza left little behind in the way of personal facts and furnishings. But what of the tug of necessity, the urgings of the flesh, to which this genius philosopher (and grinder of lenses) might have been no more immune than the next man-or the next character, as Baruch Spinoza becomes in this intriguing novel by the remarkable young Macedonian author Goce Smilevski. Smilevski's novel brings the thinker Spinoza, all inner life, into conversation with the outer, all-too-real facts of his life and his day--from his connection to the Jewish community of Amsterdam, his excommunication in 1656, and the emergence of his philosophical system to his troubling feelings for his fourteen-year-old Latin teacher Clara Maria van den Enden and later his disciple Johannes Casearius. From this conversation there emerges a compelling and complex portrait of the life of an idea--and of a man who tries to live that idea. "Through this extraordinary literary expedition, [he] gives the Spinoza 'hologram,' usually projected onto the pages of historic-philosophical studies, his peculiar double--a man of flesh and blood who paradoxically shares his lonely universe with all those existing, or to exist, similar to him."--Ana Dimiskovska, PEN Center Literary Review From Publishers Weekly: At the deathbed of 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, "you," a kind of theoretical interlocutor, notices a teardrop on the dead man's cheek-of which his spirit then denies the existence. Thus begins Macedonian novelist Smilevski's fourth novel (his first translated into English), which uses Spinoza's work as a way into his scantily documented life. In order "[t]o understand my contempt for tears," Spinoza goes on to tell his life story: the early death of his mother, his rejection of all romance, the books he wrote and the ideas he cultivated-it's a life free from emotion or desire, lived according to his ideals. At the end, the interlocutor demands a retelling, one told by the Spinoza "who knew what despair and sorrow really meant"-and gets it. Not only does Smilevski fulfill the difficult task of explaining Spinoza's dense ideas, dropping sly references to Darwin and Kundera into 17th-century Dutch life but he makes a hidden life wonderfully manifest. Click the book cover above to read more. THE ATTACK A novel by Yasmina Khadra MAY 2006. Nan A Talese. From Publishers Weekly: [Ms.] Yasmina Khadra, the pseudonym of [Mr.] Mohammed Moulessehoul, an exiled Algerian writer celebrated for his politically themed fiction (The Swallows of Kabul), turns his attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in this moving novel unlikely to satisfy partisans on either side of the issue. Dr. Amin Jaafari is a man caught between two worlds; he's a Bedouin Arab surgeon struggling to integrate himself into Israeli society. The balancing act becomes impossible when the terrorist responsible for a suicide bombing that claims 20 lives, including many children, is identified as Jaafari's wife by the Israeli police. Jaafari's disbelief that his secular, loving spouse committed the atrocity is overcome when he receives a letter from her posthumously. In an effort to make sense of her decision, Jaafari plunges into the Palestinian territories to discover the forces that recruited her. Khadra, who nicely captures his hero's turmoil in trying to come to terms with the endless violence, closes on an appropriately grim note. Click the book cover above to read more. Triangle A Novel by Katharine Weber June 2006. FSG Esther Gottesfeld is the last living survivor of the notorious 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire and has told her story countless times in the span of her lifetime. Even so, her death at the age of 106 leaves unanswered many questions about what happened that fateful day. How did she manage to survive the fire when at least 146 workers, most of them women, her sister and fianc� among them, burned or jumped to their deaths from the sweatshop inferno? Are the discrepancies in her various accounts over the years just ordinary human fallacy, or is there a hidden story in Esther's recollections of that terrible day? Esther's granddaughter Rebecca Gottesfeld, with her partner George Botkin, an ingenious composer, seek to unravel the facts of the matter while Ruth Zion, a zealous feminist historian of the fire, bores in on them with her own mole-like agenda. A brilliant, haunting novel about one of the most terrible tragedies in early-twentieth-century America, Triangle forces us to consider how we tell our stories, how we hear them, and how history is forged from unverifiable truths. Click the book cover above to read more. Gucci Gucci Coo A novel by Sue Margolis JUNE 2006. Bantam From Booklist: Ruby Silverman's boutique caters to London mothers who treat their tots like the latest fashion accessories. And the type of celebrities whose pregnancy bumps miraculously disappear the minute they're holding their new bundles of joy. But when she accidentally catches a pregnant star sporting a prosthetic belly, she suspects something fishy is going on at London's best maternity ward. Just to make things interesting, Ruby has recently begun dating a handsome American doctor at that very hospital. Margolis deftly takes on pregnancy, relationships, body image, and medical ethics all in one hilarious and quick-paced package. Who knew baby brokering could be such a riot? This popular British author keeps turning out fun and witty novels that readers will grab off the shelves. Though her previous books have drawn many Bridget Jones comparisons, her writing may become the new standard for the chick-lit genre. Click the book cover above to read more. HARD A novel by WAYNE HOFFMAN JUNE 2006. Carroll and Graf Taking place over the course of a single year, HARD periodically stops the action to delve into the sexual psyche of its main characters, exploring what motivates them, what turns them on, what defines their identity - what makes them hard. As FAGGOTS explored the 1970s sexual universe of gay men in New York, Hard takes a serious look a generation later, taking readers into adult theaters, online chat rooms, bedrooms, and into the minds of the gay men who have sex there. But while Faggots was written before AIDS, the characters in Hard are very much affected by the epidemic: Frank lost his lover to the disease, Gene is HIV-positive, Aaron's lover unwittingly puts them both in danger, and Moe Pearlman's sexual politics are deeply informed by AIDS. There's nobody in Hard who hasn't had his sexuality and politics shaped by the epidemic. There's also a motley crew of activists and sex partners, co-workers and family members, porn stars and B-list celebrities. The complex web of characters and subplots create a rich portrait of New York in the 1990s. And, like Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, Hard does it with edgy humor, snappy dialogue, and a scene-driven episodic structure. Mr. Hoffman, the author, is an editor at THE FORWARD. Click the book cover above to read more. Hidden A novel by Victoria Lustbader JUNE 2006. Forge From Publishers Weekly: Lustbader's debut novel, set in roaring '20s New York, updates the Rich Man, Poor Man plot with a Brokeback Mountain twist. David Warshinski, 18, leaves his Jewish family's Lower East Side tenement to join the army, where he meets Jed Gates, grandson of a Manhattan business mogul. When the two friends return from WWI, David cuts off family ties, abandons his religion and changes his name to Shaw, while Jed refuses to acknowledge that he is in love with David. Instead, Jed dutifully marries, fathers a son and goes to work in the family business, keeping David, a financial and marketing genius bent on getting ahead, by his side. Meanwhile, David's sister Sarah, a seamstress still mourning their sister Rose (lost in the Triangle Factory fire) stealthily keeps track of David, and Jed's sister Lucy, a Henry Street Settlement nurse, knows all about David's desires. Lustbader, long time fiction editor at Harper & Row and Putnam, and the spouse of novelist Eric, skillfully envisions history in the making during a time of economic and social change. She falls prey to a few family saga clich�s (fraternal feuds, maternal manipulation), but is terrific in depicting her characters' work lives. She transcends the miniseries story line to reveal a promising talent in historical fiction. Click the book cover above to read more. THE CANTOR'S DAUGHTER STORIES By SCOTT NADELSON JUNE 2006. HawthorneBooks.com The Cantor's Daughter is the compelling new collection from Oregon Book Award Winner and recipient of the GLCA's New Writers Award for 2005, Scott Nadelson. In his follow-up to Saving Stanley, these stories capture Jewish New Jersey suburbanites in moments of crucial transition, when they have the opportunity to connect with those closest to them or forever miss their chance for true intimacy. In "The Headhunter," two men develop an unlikely friendship at work, but after twenty years of mutually supporting each other's families and careers their friendship comes to an abrupt and surprising end. In the title story, Noa Nechemia and her father have immigrated from Israel following a tragic car accident her mother did not survive. In one stunning moment of insight following a disastrous prom night, Noa discovers her ability to transcend grief and determine the direction of her own life. And in "Half a Day in Halifax" Beth and Roger meet on a cruise ship where their shared lack of enthusiasm for their trip sparks the possibility of romance. Nadelson's stories are sympathetic, heartbreaking, and funny as they investigate the characters' fragile emotional bonds and the fears that often cause those bonds to falter or fail. From Publishers Weekly: The most authentic pieces in Nadelson's collection of eight careful stories about suburban New Jersey Jews (after Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories) turn on the inescapable mix of love and destruction in father-son or father-daughter relationships. In "Model Rockets," Nadelson's most affecting story, three well-drawn generations are locked in an uncomfortable familial embrace: Benny tries to protect, control and punish his misfit 16-year-old son, Steven, while his father-in-law-and employer-undermines his authority. But Nadelson overloads the title story, about a 16-year-old girl hemmed in by her widowed father's grief and her boyfriend's clich�d, self-serving romantic fantasies until she arrives at a feminist epiphany that feels unearned. Elsewhere, Nadelson diagrams ugly undercurrents to family dynamics or depicts lonely people yearning to connect while their relationships stall on resentment and self-doubt, as in "Half a Day in Halifax," about a doomed affair between two homely singles on a Carnival cruise. Nadelson bears unflinching witness to his characters' darkness-murderous sibling rivalry, self-loathing, selfishness-but he telegraphs too much. Click the book cover above to read more. LILAH A FORBIDDEN LOVE, A PEOPLE'S DESTINY A NOVEL BY MAREK HALTER JUNE 2006. CROWN. From Publishers Weekly: In his final installment of the Canaan Trilogy (Sarah; Zipporah), Halter ambitiously tackles portions of the complicated biblical book of Ezra, which centers on the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple and calls Israel to ethnic and religious purity. In the Persian town of Susa, the beautiful Lilah dreams of marrying her Persian lover and childhood sweetheart, Antinoes. However, her beloved brother Ezra, who has immersed himself in studying the laws of God, refuses to approve of their union since Antinoes is not a Jew. As the story unfolds, with scenes full of rich detail, Lilah becomes the unlikely instrument of gaining royal approval for the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the holy city. However, once there, Ezra orders all non-Jewish wives and children driven away in what is surely one of the most heart-wrenching episodes directly from scripture. A horrified Lilah repudiates her brother and leaves with them. As the cast-off women wander unprotected outside the city, rape, murder and mayhem ensue. (It's confusing that Lilah narrates one violent scene, but readers are unsure how she survives it.) As in Sarah and Zipporah, there is plenty of highly charged sexuality and some imaginative storytelling..... Click the book cover above to read more. TERRORIST A novel By John Updike JuNE 2006. Knopf From Publishers Weekly: Ripped from the headlines doesn't begin to describe Updike's latest, a by-the-numbers novelization of the last five years' news reports on the dangers of home-grown terror that packs a gut punch. Ahmad Mulloy Ashmawy is 18 and attends Central High School in the commuter city of New Prospect, N.J. He is the son of an Egyptian exchange student who married a working-class Irish-American girl and then disappeared when Ahmad was three. Ahmad, disgusted by his mother's inability to get it together, is in the thrall of Shaikh Rashid, who runs a storefront mosque and preaches divine retribution for "devils," including the "Zionist dominated federal government."The list of devils is long: it includes Joryleen Grant, the white trash slut with a heart of gold; Tylenol Jones, a black tough guy with whom Ahmad obliquely competes for Joryleen's attentions (which Ahmad eventually pays for); Jack Levy, a Central High guidance counselor who at 63 has seen enough failure, including his own, to last him a lifetime (and whose Jewishness plays a part in a manner unthinkable before 9/11); Jack's wife, Beth, as ineffectual and overweight (Updike is merciless on this) as she is oblivious; and Teresa Mulloy, a nurse's aide and Sunday painter as desperate for Jack's attention, when he takes on Ahmad's case, as Jack is for hers. Updike has distilled all their flaws to a caustic, crystalline essence; he dwells on their poor bodies and the debased world in which they move unrelentingly, and with a dispassionate cruelty that verges on shocking. Ahmad's revulsion for American culture doesn't seem to displease Updike one iota. But Updike has also thoroughly digested all of the discursive pap surrounding the post-9/11 threat of terrorism, and that is the real story here. Mullahs, botched CIA gambits, race and class shame (that leads to poor self-worth that leads to vulnerability that leads to extremism), half-baked plots that just might work" all are here, and dispatched with an elegance that highlights their banality and how very real they may be. So smooth is Updike in putting his grotesques through their paces" effortlessly putting them in each others' orbits" that his contempt for them enhances rather than spoils the novel. Click the book cover above to read more. What is it with Harvard Law grads.. they can't just be attorneys, they also have to write novels: Anonymous Lawyer A Novel by Jeremy Blachman, Esq. AUGUST 2006. Henry Holt. I first started to read the ANONYMOUSLAWYER.blogspot blog in 2004, when the author wrote this hilarious posting: ".....You know what I hate? The Jewish holidays. It's defensible to make someone work on their kid's birthday. It's defensible to make them work when their dad's having surgery. It's defensible to make them come back in three weeks after they have a baby. But for some reason, you call it a holiday - and it's not just the Jewish holidays I'm talking about; it's any holiday - and people want to guilt you into letting them take time off. Our clients don't care if it's the American New Year, the Jewish New Year, or the Chinese New Year. I hate hearing that someone wasn't planning on coming into the office on Presidents Day, or Labor Day, or July 4th: what are you celebrating, and why can't you be here? You want an hour off on Christmas Eve to go to mass? I'm willing to let you do that. Two hours to go to temple on Yom Kippur? Fine. I won't schedule the meeting right at sundown. An hour to take your daughter to the doctor for a pregnancy test? I'm willing to be flexible. But you don't need four days off in two weeks for the Jewish holidays, especially right when everyone's getting back into the swing of things after their August vacations; you don't need a 4-day weekend to give thanks for the Pilgrims, especially less a month before Christmas; and you can take your wife out to dinner the day after Valentine's Day when the restaurants are less crowded. Children go to school on their birthdays; you can come to work on George Washington's birthday, Martin Luther King's birthday, and Jesus's birthday...." Yes, this is the blog of the fictitious hiring partner at one of the world's largest law firms. Brilliant yet ruthless, he has little patience for associates who leave the office before midnight or steal candy from the bowl on his secretary's desk. He hates holidays and paralegals. And he's just started a weblog to tell the world about what life is really like at the top of his profession. Meet Anonymous Lawyer-corner office, granite desk, and a billable rate of $675 an hour. The summer is about to start, and he's got a new crop of law school interns who will soon sign away their lives for a six-figure salary at the firm. But he's also got a few problems that require his attention. There's The Jerk, his bitter rival at the firm, who is determined to do whatever it takes to beat him out for the chairman's job. There's Anonymous Wife, who is spending his money as fast as he can make it. And there's that secret blog he's writing, which is a perverse bit of fun until he gets an e-mail from someone inside the firm who knows he's its author. Written in the form of a blog, Anonymous Lawyer is a spectacularly entertaining debut that rips away the bland fa�ade of corporate law and offers a telling glimpse inside a frightening world. Hilarious and fiendishly clever, Jeremy Blachman's tale of a lawyer who lives a lie and posts the truth is sure to be one of the year's most talked-about novels. Click the book cover to read more. The Messenger A novel by Daniel Silva AUGUST 2006. Putnam. Gabriel Allon, art restorer and spy, has been widely acclaimed as one of the most fascinating characters in the genre and now he is about to face the greatest challenge of his life. Allon is recovering from a grueling showdown with a Palestinian master terrorist, when a figure from his past arrives in Jerusalem. Monsignor Luigi Donati is the private secretary to His Holiness Pope Paul VII, and a man as ruthless as he is intelligent. Now, however, he has come to seek Allon's help. A young Swiss guard has been found dead in St. Peter's Basilica, and although Donati has allowed the official inquiry to determine that it is suicide, his instinct tells him that it is murder-and that his master is in grave danger. He has trusted Allon in the past, and he is the only man he trusts now. Allon reluctantly agrees to get involved, but once he begins to investigate he concludes that Donati has every right to be concerned, as, following the trail from the heart of the Vatican to the valleys of Switzerland and beyond, he slowly unravels a conspiracy of lies and deception. An extraordinary enemy walks among them, with but one goal: the most spectacular assassination ever attempted. Filled with remarkable characters and breathtaking double and triple turns of plot, The Messenger solidifies Silva's reputation as his generation's finest writer of international thrillers. Click the book covers to read more. One of our favorite books for late Summer: Golden Country A Novel by Jennifer Gilmore August 15, 2006. Scribner Golden Country, Jennifer Gilmore's masterful and irreverent reinvention of the Jewish American novel, captures the exuberance of the American dream while exposing its underbelly -- disillusionment, greed, and the disaffection bred by success. As Gilmore's charmingly flawed characters witness and shape history, they come to embody America's greatness, as well as its greatest imperfections. Spanning the first half of the twentieth century, Golden Country vividly brings to life the intertwining stories of three immigrants seeking their fortunes -- the handsome and ambitious Seymour, a salesman-turned-gangster-turned-Broadway-producer; the gentle and pragmatic Joseph, a door-to-door salesman who is driven to invent a cleanser effective enough to wipe away the shame of his brother's mob connections; and the irresistible Frances Gold, who grows up in Brooklyn, stars in Seymour's first show, and marries the man who invents television. Their three families, though inex-tricably connected for years, are brought together for the first time by the engagement of Seymour's son and Joseph's daughter. David and Miriam's marriage must endure the inheritance of not only their parents' wealth but also the burdens of their past. Epic and comic, poignant and wise, Golden Country introduces readers to an extraordinary new voice in fiction. Click the book cover to read more. Murder in Jerusalem A Michael Ohayon Mystery by Batya Gur August 1, 2006. HarperCollins Modern Israel is a place filled with contradictions: the beautiful landscape often rife with human conflict; the tranquil and the peaceful in constant struggle with terrible destruction; and amazing human love and kindness set against a backdrop of civil strife. Through the eyes of a writer like Batya Gur and her finest creation, Chief Superintendent Michael Ohayon, these complexities are treated with an intimate familiarity and rare depth of understanding. When a woman's body is discovered in the wardrobe warehouses of Israel Television, the brooding Ohayon embarks on a tangled and bloody trail of detection through the corridors and studios of Israel's official television station and, especially, through the relations, fears, loves, and courage of the people who make the station what it is. It is a journey that brings into question the very ideals upon which Ohayon -- and indeed the entire nation -- was raised, ideals that may have led to terrible crimes. Chief Superintendent Ohayon has spent his career surrounded by perplexing and horrific cases, but perhaps nothing disturbs him more deeply than what this mysterious woman's murder reveals. For the media, often at the center of the Israeli consciousness -- a place where political tensions; hostility; corruption; and the ethnic, social, and religious divisions that shake the nation come together -- may indeed be at the root of an unspeakable evil. Murder in Jerusalem is the crowning achievement of a magnificent career, this final installment in the Michael Ohayon series a wonderful parting gift from the incomparable Batya Gur -- one last fascinating visit to an always tumultuous land, in the company of a writer and a detective so many devoted readers have loved so well. . Click the book cover to read more. TOLSTOY LIED A LOVE STORY BY RACHEL KADDISH SEPTEMBER 1, 2006. Houghton Mifflin FROM THE AUTHOR OF "From a Sealed Room" comes a new story. Tolstoy famously wrote, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." To Tracy Farber, thirty-three, happily single and headed for tenure at a major university, this celebrated maxim is questionable at best. Because if Tolstoy is to be taken at his word, only unhappiness is interesting. Happiness must be as placid and unmemorable as a daisy in a field of a thousand daisies. So Tracy sets out to prove that happiness and the search for happiness can be, must be, a complicated mission. But little does she know that her best proof will come when she meets George, who will sweep her off her feet and challenge all of her old assumptions. Love may be the ultimate clich�, but in Rachel Kadish"s hands, it is also a morally serious question, deserving of our sober attention as well as our delighted laughter. Click the book cover to read more. Love, with Noodles An Amorous Widower's Tale by Harry Freund September 2006, Carroll & Graf Stockbroker Dan Gelder (60) has a posh Fifth Avenue address, is two years a widower, and remains faithful to his deceased wife. Numbed by grief, he is annoyed-not flattered-by the attentions of the women introduced to him by friends. Then he meets Violet Finkel. And Susan Klein. And Myra Cox. And Tatiana Andrevsky. Violet tempts him with limitless luxury and then with truly profound affection, which he discovers on a journey with her to Jerusalem. But plumpish, pretty Susan offers him cookies in her kitchen, while Myra, an activist dedicated to the cause - and jewelry - of Native Americans, tests the strength of his lower back. Exotic Tatiana weds beauty to mystery, and grace to pride, as she strives to overcome a Russian immigrant's poverty for herself and her young son. Dan's son, Eric, meanwhile, is facing bankruptcy, which Dan can handle more readily than Eric's marriage proposal to the non-Jewish Carol Hoffman. Forced to examine this unexpected crisis in terms of his own faith and his Jewish heritage, Dan at sixty finds that more than his libido has been renewed. This comic, yet wise, delightful novel views the follies and fallibilities of romance at a certain age-serving up love deliciously, with noodles. Click the book cover to read more. LENNY BRUCE IS DEAD by Jonathan Goldstein MARCH 2006, Counterpoint From Publishers Weekly: Goldstein's woeful, funny debut novel is a series of aphorism-capped vignettes, paced at the rate of approximately one scene per paragraph. As these snapshots flash past, protagonist Josh ages rapidly from child to onanistic teen to depressive adult, mourning the death of his mother and the loss of a series of vividly described girlfriends along the way. Throughout, descriptions of Josh's suburban-anytown Jewish upbringing and job at local fast-food franchise Burger Zoo, while peppered with scatological and Portnoy's Complaint-esque sordidly sexual details, often achieve a level of nuance that's poetic and almost profound. In the latter third of the book, Josh's preoccupation with a Hasidic neighbor and the "Rebbe's Kosher-style Love Lotion" that he begins to experiment with grow repetitive and confusing. But "This American Life" contributing editor Goldstein has a knack for imagery ("He was crying on the floor, pulling toilet paper off the spool with both hands like he was climbing a rope") and ear for hyper-realistic dialogue, making him a writer to watch. Click the book cover above to read more. The Last Jew A Novel (Hardcover) by Yoram Kaniuk, Barbara Harshav Grove Press March 2006. Innovative novelist Yoram Kaniuk takes us from the scorched earth of mid-century Europe, to the arid plains of the Holy Land, to the urban bustle of the American Diaspora, compressing the rise and fall of the Jews into the enigmatic character of one Ebenezer Schneerson. Following the ravages of World War II, Ebenezer finds that although he has no recollection of his family or childhood, he can, at will, recite Einstein's theory of relativity, the entire canon of Yiddish poetry, and the genealogical histories of any number of extinguished shtetls; he has somehow become the final repository for all of Jewish culture. Samuel Lipker, a fellow survivor and crass opportunist, makes money off of Ebenezer's macabre talents, trotting him around Europe to regale spooked cabaret audiences with his uncanny memory. Appearing in English for the first time, The Last Jew is an ingenious tapestry alive with narrative acrobatics and stylistic audacity. Alternately tragic, absurd, heartbreaking, and bitter - not unlike the Bible itself - it is a profound exploration of Jewish identity and the multitude of disparate, often contradictory shapes it has taken in the last century. Click the book cover above to read more. The Mercy Room A Novel by Gilles Rozier Little Brown, March 2006. From Booklist: Starred Review This haunting and, at times, harrowing novel, set in France during the German occupation of the 1940s, is a variation of the Anne Frank story. The narrator lives in a small town, in the family house, where the mother and sister also live; the father is a prisoner of war in Germany. The narrator teaches German at the local school and regards the literature in that language to be the supreme passion of life. That is, until one day when the narrator, awaiting a translation assignment from the local Gestapo agency, lays eyes on an attractive young man--Jewish--who obviously is being taken off. The narrator whisks the young man away and stashes him in the wine cellar of the family home. There the young man lives, hidden away, for more than two years--during which the narrator and he fall in love and have a torrid sexual relationship. But as the end of the war approaches, the young man loses patience with his captivity, and an escape is planned, but things don't go as he and the narrator had outlined. Adding allure to the drama is that the gender of the narrator is never revealed; is this a heterosexual or homosexual affair? We never need to know, for this gripping story transcends such specifics. Click the book cover above to read more. Seven Days to the Sea : An Epic Novel of the Exodus by Rebecca Kohn Rugged Land (March 21, 2006) As a child, Miryam foretells the birth of a leader who will save their people from oppression-a vision so vivid that she dedicates her life to seeing it fulfilled in her brother, Moses. But after many years, she wonders in the deepest confines of her heart if her sacrifices mean anything, if her calling is real. Tzipporah, a desert shepherdess who knows nothing of her husband's divine purpose, suffers as he is torn from her by a strange god, a foreign people, and an unforgiving sister. In her heart, she harbors terrible secrets that haunt the love she shares with Moses and threaten her tenuous peace with Miryam. Together, Miryam and Tzipporah weave a narrative that gives voice to the women of Exodus-their lives, their community, and ultimately, their sisterhood. Click the book cover above to read more. GIRL STORIES A graphic novel by Lauren Weinstein APRIL 2006. Henry Holt Books for Young Readers. Ages 12-19. From Publishers Weekly: Starred Review. Weinstein's short, bitterly hilarious stories of teenage-girl angst were a popular feature on gURL.com; this book collects them, along with new material that turns them into a loose narrative of her semiautobiographical protagonist's eighth- and ninth-grade years. "Lauren" is obsessively concerned with her social standing and weight, guilty about still playing with Barbies, fixated on Morrissey, annoyed by being Jewish at Christmas, tormented by a navel piercing gone awry and perplexed by the mystery of boys and why they like her or don't. (It doesn't help that everyone in her school is as cruel as, well, teenagers.) Fortunately, her imagination, her sense of humor and her knack for woe-is-me exaggeration are her escape routes. Weinstein draws her stories with frantic, scraggly lines and eye-scalding neon colors straight off the teenage cosmetics rack. Everything looks crude and distorted on the surface, but her artwork is a lot cleverer and subtler than it initially appears. Weinstein understands the painful immediacy of everything in teenagers' lives-how every success, even in egging a tree, feels like a monumental victory, and every moment of social or academic awkwardness feels like the end of the world-and these anecdotes and images both sympathize with and mock this revelation. Click the book cover above to read more. The Notebook Girls by Julia Baskin, Lindsey Newman, Sophie Pollitt-Cohen, Courtney Toombs APRIL 2006. Warner. Four young students from NYC's Stuyvesant High School shared a notebook diary. If you ever wanted to be a voyeur, or know what teens actually think about sex or Jewish identity or school or life... this is a must Julia, Lindsey, Sophie, and Courtney enter Stuyvesant, New York City's most prestigious public high school, in September of 2001, just days before they watch the Twin Towers crumble outside their classroom window. A bond of friendship is struck, and yet demanding class schedules, extracurricular activities, and busy social lives make it hard for them to stay in touch. This prompts the four girls to start "The Notebook," a collective journal'ing project that allows them to express their frustrations, triumphs, and everyday encounters inside an ordinary composition book. Their experiences are not unusual: They get cut from teams, get bad grades, win debates, get rebuffed by boyfriends, plan surprise parties, smoke, drink, experiment with sex, and argue with their parents. But it is the raw honesty of these page-turning exchanges that will captivate readers, involving them in both their individual and group stories, and laying bare what it is really like to be a teenager today. Click the book cover above to read more. BLUE NUDE A novel by Elizabeth Rosner APRIL 2006. Ballantine Books. In this sensual, intimate novel, prizewinning poet and bestselling author Elizabeth Rosner tells the engrossing and timely story of an artist and his model, and the moral and political implications of their relationship. Born in the shadow of postwar Germany, Danzig is a once-prominent painter who now teaches at an art institute in San Francisco. But while Danzig shares wisdom and technique with students, his own canvases remain mysteriously empty. When a compelling new model named Merav poses for his class, Danzig, unsettled by her beauty, senses that she may be the muse he has been waiting for. The Israeli-born granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, Merav is a former art student who discovered her abilities as a model while studying in Tel Aviv. To escape the danger and violence of the Middle East, she moved to California, where she found work posing for artists around the Bay Area. Now challenged by Danzig's German accent and the menace it suggests, Merav must decide how to overcome her fears. Before they can create anything new together, both artist and model are forced to examine the history they carry. Like a paintbrush in motion, Blue Nude moves back and forth through time, recounting the events that have brought Danzig and Merav together: their disparate upbringings, their creative awakenings, and their similarly painful, often catastrophic, love lives. The novel ultimately unites them in the present and, through the transcendent power of artistic expression, moves them forward to the point of reconciliation, redemption, and revival. Using words to paint the landscapes of body and soul, Elizabeth Rosner conveys the art of survival, the complexity of history, the form of exile, the shape of desire, and the color of intimacy. Blue Nude is the narrative equivalent of a masterpiece of fine art. Click the book cover above to read more. Memoirs of a Muse A Novel by Lara Vapnyar APRIL 2006. PANTHEON. Lara Vapnyar, author of the prizewinning story collection There Are Jews in My House, brings us a poignant and comic first novel about a delightfully sincere modern-day muse. We meet Tanya as a typical Russian girl, living with her bookish professor mother in a drab Soviet apartment. As a teenager, Tanya becomes obsessed with Dostoevsky and settles on her life's calling: she will be the companion to a great writer. Her memoirs tell of her immigration to New York after college, the stifling expectations of her Brighton Beach cousins, and the crucial moment in a bookshop on the Upper West Side, where Tanya attends a reading by Mark Schneider, a Significant New York Novelist. Tanya soon moves in with Mark, ready to dazzle in bed, to serve and inspire . . . if only he would spend a little more time writing and a little less time at the gym, the shrink, and the literary soirees where she feels hopelessly unglamorous and out of place. But as she gradually learns to read English-struggling to better understand Mark's work and her true role as Muse-Tanya also learns more than she expected about the destiny she has imagined for herself. Animated by Vapnyar's beguiling grace and vividness-with a narrative richness reflecting the great tradition of Russian realism to which she is a natural heir-Memoirs of a Muse is an altogether wonderful novel. It is a lively meditation on female capabilities and happiness, on the mysteries of artistic inspiration (and the absurdities of artistic life), and, perhaps most movingly, on the pain and wonder of the immigrant experience in New York City. Click the book cover above to read more. The Water Door A Novel (Paperback) by Rosetta Loy, Gregory Conti (Translator) 2006. OTHER PRESS. A Garcia Lorca poem gives this book its title, "not even the smallest hand can open the water door," and this epigraph begins a story of unrequited love. A five-year-old girl, the daughter of a bourgeois Roman family in the late 1930s, finds the object of her desire in her German-speaking governess: blond, blue-eyed, milky-white Anne Marie. The story of their relationship spans a single season, as the family moves through its obligatory social rituals. Their customs and manners are all absorbed through the wide-eyed gaze of their little girl making her first contact with the outside world. She encounters kindergarten, the nuns and their baroque Catholicism, and most importantly, a fascinating Jewish girl who lives across the street. Their friendship will change her relationship with her governess forever, especially once the Jewish girl disappears. Loy's rhythmic, sensual prose animates a kaleidoscopic narrative, combining the intimacy of childhood emotions with nightmare glimpses of Fascist Italy during World War II . Click the book cover above to read more. EVERYMAN A NOVEL BY PHILIP ROTH MAY 2006. HOUGHTON MIFFLIN. One day your body will die, and take your mind with it. It is a very depersonalizing process. The book opens with the burial of this unnamed everyman (Everyman, the title, comes from a Christian morality play in which Death pays a visit), a burial in a Jewish cemetery that should be maintained better. It is as rundown as a decaying body. It is in New Jersey. Roth was inspired by the death of his friends, including Saul Bellow; after Bellow's funeral, Roth went home and began to write. From Publishers Weekly: What is it about Philip Roth? He has published 27 books, almost all of which deal with the same topics-Jewishness, Americanness, sex, aging, family-and yet each is simultaneously familiar and new. His latest novel is a slim but dense volume about a sickly boy who grows up obsessed with his and everybody else's health, and eventually dies in his 70s, just as he always said he would. (I'm not giving anything away here; the story begins with the hero's funeral.) It might remind you of the old joke about the hypochondriac who ordered his tombstone to read: "I told you I was sick." And yet, despite its coy title, the book is both universal and very, very specific, and Roth watchers will not be able to stop themselves from comparing the hero to Roth himself. (In most of his books, whether written in the third person or the first, a main character is a tortured Jewish guy from Newark-like Roth.) The unnamed hero here is a thrice-married adman, a father, and a philanderer. He is a 70-something who spends his last days lamenting his lost prowess (physical and sexual), envying his healthy and beloved older brother, and refusing to apologize for his many years of bad behavior, although he palpably regrets them. Surely some wiseacre critic will note that he is Portnoy all grown up, an amalgamation of all the womanizing, sex- and death-obsessed characters Roth has written about (and been?) throughout his career.But to obsess about the parallels between author and character is to miss the point: like all of Roth's works, even the lesser ones, this is an artful yet surprisingly readable treatise on... well, on being human and struggling and aging at the beginning of the new century. It also borrows devices from his previous works-there's a sequence about a gravedigger that's reminiscent of the glove-making passages in American Pastoral, and many observations will remind careful readers of both Patrimony and The Dying Animal-and through it all, there's that Rothian voice: pained, angry, arrogant and deeply, wryly funny. Nothing escapes him, not even his own self-seriousness. "Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work," he has his adman-turned-art-teacher opine about an annoying student. Obviously, Roth himself is a professional. Click the book cover above to read more. A HREF=" http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400062985/sefersafarianonl " target="_blank"> FAITH FOR BEGINNERS A novel by Aaron Hamburger Random House, OCTOBER 4, 2005 From Publishers Weekly: A woman hopes a family trip to Israel will help her reclaim her confused, rebellious son in Hamburger's entertaining, irreverent first novel (after the collection: THE VIEW FROM STALIN'S HEAD). Jeremy's been at NYU for five years, but he's still just a junior, and Helen Michaelson, 58, thinks he might have a much-needed spiritual awakening on the "Michigan Miracle 2000" tour. But while Jeremy's more interested in cruising Jerusalem's gay parks, Helen herself is primed for revelation, as she finds that her connection to Judaism and her family is more complicated than she'd thought. Hamburger has an exacting eye for mundane detail and suburban conventions, and in Jeremy he's created the classic green-haired, pierced college student ranting about social injustice. But beneath Jeremy's sarcastic, moralizing banter, there's a convincing critique of Americans' way of being in the world. In Israel in 2000, the Michaelsons are like Pixar creations trapped in a movie filmed in Super 8-the Middle East may be fraught with political tension, but their biggest problem is the heat outside their air-conditioned bus. Hamburger goes further than witty satire, though, and when the plot takes a dark turn he demonstrates that he's capable of taking on global issues, even if his characters aren't." Mrs. Michaelson just doesn't seem to get it. Why cant good manners lead to Middle East peace. But what is up with son calling her by her first name. It seems to be just the beginning crack of all that is sacred. If you let him call her Helen, will everything collapse? Also, what the author shows so beautifully, is the state of people who arrive in Israel awaiting epiphanies and idealism, but reality nastily doesn't comply. Click the book cover above to read more. A Good Place for the Night Stories (Paperback) by Savyon Liebrecht, Sondra Silverston (Translator) January 2006, Persea. Ms. Savyon Liebrecht, one of Israel's most distinguished and popular authors, has won an avid readership in the U. S. for her rich, believable fiction about affairs of the heart. Her newest collection includes seven long stories named for places-Munich, America, Tel Aviv, Hiroshima-and features Israelis abroad, women and men in love and in trouble far away from home. A woman living congenially in Hiroshima for nine years becomes involved in a love triangle with an American and a Japanese, and learns with chilling finality that she can never be at home in this city of the Japanese holocaust. The tables turn on an Israeli journalist, in Munich to cover the trial of a Nazi war criminal, when he becomes a witness to anti-Arab violence and to the murder of a beautiful Muslim woman he has secretly desired. In these searing stories setting becomes an accomplice to fate, and history intrudes into the heat of passion. In the end, A Good Place for the Night makes us realize that we are all wanderers, and the safe haven of "home" is only an idea. Click to read more. Intuition A novel by Allegra Goodman Dial, February 26, 2006 One of my fave writers, Geraldine Brooks, wrote the following in the Washington Post: "I once spent Shabbat with an Orthodox family in Jerusalem's Kiryat Mattersdorf, a neighborhood where, on Friday evenings, a siren marks the beginning of a 24-hour pause in every human act of creation. Against that looming deadline, my unflappable hostess prepared dinner for 19 -- a tough order in any situation, but even more so when the cook is abiding by the rules of kashrut. Everyone knows that pork isn't kosher, but until that Friday I wasn't aware that "things that swarm" also are off the menu. To make sure that no tiny swarming insect found its way into the meal, she peeled apart and inspected every layer of two dozen onions. Allegra Goodman's new novel, Intuition, revived that memory. Not because Goodman is a famous Jewish-American writer, whose National Book Award finalist Kaaterskill Falls probed deep into a closed world much like Kiryat Mattersdorf. Not because Goodman herself is Orthodox. (She has described herself as "a fairly observant Jew, but a very observant writer.") What brought the memory back to me was the patient handling of the onions, their careful dissection, the attentive scrutiny of layer after layer until the very center had been reached and nothing more could be done. This is the way Goodman handles her characters in Intuition. Every character here -- even the relatively minor ones, even the relatives of minor ones -- is endowed by their creator with the fullest complements of flaws, tics, vices, strengths, virtues and moments of nobility. Just when we think we know her self-promoting, hard-charging oncologist Sandy Glass, just when we are smirking contemptuously at him, Goodman peels back another layer and invites us to peer harder. We find ourselves looking at a loyal chevalier whose capacity for devotion to a colleague wipes the smirk off our face. It works in reverse with another character, Jacob, husband to Glass's exacting scientific partner, Marion Mendelssohn. Jacob has put his own brilliance at the service of his wife's career and seems the model of modest self-sacrifice. Yet he's gradually revealed as a secret manipulator who, with a few careful words, will set in motion the events that threaten his wife's reputation and the existence of her research lab. But it is not a simple matter of "people are not what they seem." Goodman doesn't stop. Sandy Glass has many more layers, and so does Jacob Mendelssohn. So does everybody.... .. continued... ... click the book cover to read more From Publishers Weekly. "In another quiet but powerful novel from Goodman (Kaaterskill Falls), a struggling cancer lab at Boston's Philpott Institute becomes the stage for its researchers' personalities and passions, and for the slippery definitions of freedom and responsibility in grant-driven American science. When the once-discredited R-7 virus, the project of playboy postdoc Cliff, seems to reduce cancerous tumors in mice, lab director Sandy Glass insists on publishing the preliminary results immediately, against the advice of his more cautious codirector, Marion Mendelssohn. The research team sees a glorious future ahead, but Robin, Cliff's resentful ex-girlfriend and co-researcher, suspects that the findings are too good to be true and attempts to prove Cliff's results are in error. The resulting inquiry spins out of control. With subtle but uncanny effectiveness, Goodman illuminates the inner lives of each character, depicting events from one point of view until another section suddenly throws that perspective into doubt. The result is an episodically paced but extremely engaging novel that reflects the stops and starts of the scientific process, as well as its dependence on the complicated individuals who do the work. In the meantime, she draws tender but unflinching portraits of the characters' personal lives for a truly humanist novel from the supposedly antiseptic halls of science." Click to read more reviews. Prince of Fire A novel by Daniel Silva Signet. Paperback edition. February 2006. BOTH A THRILLER AND A HISTORY LESSON PW writes: Silva's latest novel to feature art restorer/Israeli agent Gabriel Allon (after 2004's A Death in Vienna) is a passionate, intelligently crafted entry that cements the series' place among today's top spy fiction. The structure is classic - the semireluctant spy, Gabriel, is pulled from his cover to hunt down terrorists who have committed a horrific crime, in this case the bombing of the Israeli embassy in Rome. The mastermind behind the bombing is French archeologist Paul Martineau, aka "Khaled, son of Sabri, grandson of Sheikh Asad. Khaled, avenger of past wrongs, sword of Palestine." Orphaned as a child after his father is killed by the Israelis, Khaled is also the adopted son of Yasir Arafat, who has now activated Khaled to wreak vengeance on his mortal enemies. Gabriel assembles a team of crack young agents and sets out to find when and where Khaled will strike next. The determined team tracks down the terrorist, but when Gabriel goes in for the kill the plot takes a stunning twist; the lives of all, plus hundreds of innocent bystanders, are threatened. Gabriel is a complex character with a rich past. His wife, Leah, is confined to a psychiatric hospital in London, mentally damaged and physically disfigured from the bombing that killed their son. He lives with the beautiful Chiara, whom he can't marry out of loyalty to Leah, even though she seems to barely know him. Silva hints at further entries in the series in which Gabriel must step up and assume new duties: "Gabriel, you are the mightiest," his former mentor tells the agent. "You're the one who defends Israel against its accusers. You're the angel of judgment - the Prince of Fire." Click to read more. Jetlag by Etgar Keret FEBRUARY 2006, TOBY PRESS From Publishers Weekly: First published as a limited edition in 1999, this anthology presents five short stories by popular Israeli author Keret adapted into comics by the five members of the Actus Tragicus collective. Keret's tales are brief, surreal fables that set up a witty premise and then end fairly abruptly. In the opening "HaTrick" (drawn by Batia Kolton), a children's magician, attempting to pull a rabbit out of his hat, pulls out the rabbit's severed head; when he tries it again, he withdraws a dead baby. Unfortunately for the artists, these stories are built more on suggestion than on action. In a few cases, literal representations of the story kill its mystique-particularly the title piece, drawn by Itzik Rennert, in which a man on an airplane (next to an evil dwarf disguised as a little girl) realizes that the flight attendant has fallen in love with him and plans to save him from a terrible fate. Only Mira Friedmann's visual elaboration on "Passage to Hell," which incorporates a good deal of pantomime that Keret doesn't mention in his text, adds much to its story. But the artwork is consistently terrific in its own right-the Actus group's stately compositions and calculated distortions owe more to modern art than to the comics tradition. Click the book cover above to read more. THE WOMEN'S MINYAN A novel BY NAOMI RAGEN March 2006, Toby Press. Her many fans will welcome the publication of Naomi Ragen's first play, which premiered in July 2002 at Habima National Theater in Tel Aviv. It is based on a true story: a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) woman, wife of a rabbi, mother of 12, leaves her home and stays with a friend. The community's "modesty squad" tries in vain to force her to go back. Her friend is physically attacked, her arm and leg broken. The rabbi's wife is punished: she is cut off from her children, against her will. Novelist Ragen learned of this tragic story several years ago from a newspaper article. "We've been together ever since then," she says. "They simply crushed this wonderful woman who never committed any crime. It's not a melodrama. It's a story of social truth, like Ibsen's A Doll's House. "I tried to write a play about the status of the Jewish woman in the strictly Orthodox world," continues Ragen. "The religious woman does not have any public place in which she can express her opinions in a natural fashion. Conversely, every man can say whatever he wants from the platform of the synagogue, on any subject, including current events; religious women have never had access to it. In synagogue, we pray upstairs in the women's section, while the men get up and say what they want to the entire congregation. Why shouldn't the woman have the same right? Is she less intelligent? Does she have fewer interesting things to say?" .... Click to read more. Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes by T. Cooper ( a Koret finalist in 2004) Dutton Adult (March 16, 2006). NOTE: When Ms. Cooper's grandparents arrived at Ellis Island, they actually DID lose a child, and never found him. They moved on. Part of his grandparents family ended up in Amarillo, Texas, part of the Galveston Movement of sending Jews to the hinterlands. Epic, ambitious, heartbreaking, and wholly original, T Cooper's Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes is a literary tour de force that spans the twentieth century with one family's search for a lost son. In Lipshitz Six, or Two Angry Blondes, author T Cooper chronicles the unusual history of the Lipshitz family, Jewish refugees who narrowly escape the bloody Russian pogroms of 1903. Upon landing at Ellis Island, Esther and Hersh Lipshitz lose their uncharacteristically blond-haired, blue-eyed son Reuven. Circumstances eventually force them to give up their fruitless search for Reuven and to join a relative living in the Texas panhandle. However, Esther never stops pondering the fate of her lost son, and when she sees a picture of the blond, blue-eyed Charles Lindbergh after his 1927 transatlantic flight, she becomes convinced that the aviator is her grown son Reuven. Esther's obsession with Lindbergh (Reuven) slowly destroys those around her and will leave far-reaching effects on the entire Lipshitz family. In 2002 in New York City, we encounter the character T Cooper, the last living Lipshitz, who has received an unsolicited box from his estranged mother. In it, he finds clippings and letters to Charles Lindbergh and his family, all once carefully preserved by his great-grandmother Esther. When he is forced back to Texas to bury his suddenly and tragically deceased parents, T finds himself the inheritor of a family history filled with loose ends, factual errors, and maniacal behavior. An ex-literary golden boy who has quit writing to pursue a career as a bar mitzvah entertainer who impersonates the rapper Eminem, T struggles to make sense of all that came before him and-in light of his wife's desire to have a baby-what legacy he might leave behind as well. Click to read more. LENNY BRUCE IS DEAD by Jonathan Goldstein MARCH 2006, Counterpoint From Publishers Weekly: Goldstein's woeful, funny debut novel is a series of aphorism-capped vignettes, paced at the rate of approximately one scene per paragraph. As these snapshots flash past, protagonist Josh ages rapidly from child to onanistic teen to depressive adult, mourning the death of his mother and the loss of a series of vividly described girlfriends along the way. Throughout, descriptions of Josh's suburban-anytown Jewish upbringing and job at local fast-food franchise Burger Zoo, while peppered with scatological and Portnoy's Complaint-esque sordidly sexual details, often achieve a level of nuance that's poetic and almost profound. In the latter third of the book, Josh's preoccupation with a Hasidic neighbor and the "Rebbe's Kosher-style Love Lotion" that he begins to experiment with grow repetitive and confusing. But "This American Life" contributing editor Goldstein has a knack for imagery ("He was crying on the floor, pulling toilet paper off the spool with both hands like he was climbing a rope") and ear for hyper-realistic dialogue, making him a writer to watch. Click the book cover above to read more. The Last Jew A Novel (Hardcover) by Yoram Kaniuk, Barbara Harshav Grove Press March 2006. Innovative novelist Yoram Kaniuk takes us from the scorched earth of mid-century Europe, to the arid plains of the Holy Land, to the urban bustle of the American Diaspora, compressing the rise and fall of the Jews into the enigmatic character of one Ebenezer Schneerson. Following the ravages of World War II, Ebenezer finds that although he has no recollection of his family or childhood, he can, at will, recite Einstein's theory of relativity, the entire canon of Yiddish poetry, and the genealogical histories of any number of extinguished shtetls; he has somehow become the final repository for all of Jewish culture. Samuel Lipker, a fellow survivor and crass opportunist, makes money off of Ebenezer's macabre talents, trotting him around Europe to regale spooked cabaret audiences with his uncanny memory. Appearing in English for the first time, The Last Jew is an ingenious tapestry alive with narrative acrobatics and stylistic audacity. Alternately tragic, absurd, heartbreaking, and bitter - not unlike the Bible itself - it is a profound exploration of Jewish identity and the multitude of disparate, often contradictory shapes it has taken in the last century. Click to read more. The Mercy Room A Novel by Gilles Rozier Little Brown, March 2006. From Booklist: Starred Review This haunting and, at times, harrowing novel, set in France during the German occupation of the 1940s, is a variation of the Anne Frank story. The narrator lives in a small town, in the family house, where the mother and sister also live; the father is a prisoner of war in Germany. The narrator teaches German at the local school and regards the literature in that language to be the supreme passion of life. That is, until one day when the narrator, awaiting a translation assignment from the local Gestapo agency, lays eyes on an attractive young man--Jewish--who obviously is being taken off. The narrator whisks the young man away and stashes him in the wine cellar of the family home. There the young man lives, hidden away, for more than two years--during which the narrator and he fall in love and have a torrid sexual relationship. But as the end of the war approaches, the young man loses patience with his captivity, and an escape is planned, but things don't go as he and the narrator had outlined. Adding allure to the drama is that the gender of the narrator is never revealed; is this a heterosexual or homosexual affair? We never need to know, for this gripping story transcends such specifics. Click to read more. Seven Days to the Sea : An Epic Novel of the Exodus by Rebecca Kohn Rugged Land (March 21, 2006) As a child, Miryam foretells the birth of a leader who will save their people from oppression-a vision so vivid that she dedicates her life to seeing it fulfilled in her brother, Moses. But after many years, she wonders in the deepest confines of her heart if her sacrifices mean anything, if her calling is real. Tzipporah, a desert shepherdess who knows nothing of her husband's divine purpose, suffers as he is torn from her by a strange god, a foreign people, and an unforgiving sister. In her heart, she harbors terrible secrets that haunt the love she shares with Moses and threaten her tenuous peace with Miryam. Together, Miryam and Tzipporah weave a narrative that gives voice to the women of Exodus-their lives, their community, and ultimately, their sisterhood. Click to read more. DAYS OF ATONEMENT A novel By Ellen Boneparth 2005. The story of a contemporary Jewish woman's search for her roots against the backdrop of the Greek Holocaust. Baka Freeman unearths never before told stories of Greek Jewish suffering and terror while searching for her roots. Click to read more about this book. THE NIMROD FLIPOUT by ETGAR KERET. Translated from Hebrew April 2006. FSG. Already featured on This American Life and Selected Shorts and in Zoetrope: All Story and L.A. Weekly, these short stories include a man who finds equal pleasure in his beautiful girlfriend and the fat, soccer-loving lout she turns into after dark; shrinking parents; a case of impotence cured by a pet terrier; and a pessimistic Middle Eastern talking fish. A bestseller in Israel, The Nimrod Flipout is an extraordinary collection from the preeminent Israeli writer of his generation. Click to read more. The World to Come A novel by Dara Horn January 2006, WW Norton In 2005, a million-dollar painting, a sketch for "Over Vitebsk" by Marc Chagall, is stolen from a museum - during a singles' cocktail hour. The unlikely thief is Benjamin Ziskind, a lonely former child-prodigy who writes questions for quiz shows, and who believes the painting belongs to his family. Ben tries to evade the police while he seeks out the truth of how the painting got to the museum - whether the "original" is really a forgery - and whether his twin sister, an artist, can create a successful forgery to take its place. As the story unfolds - with the delicacy and complexity of origami - we are brought back to the 1920s in Soviet Russia, where Marc Chagall taught art to orphaned Jewish boys. There, Chagall befriended the great Yiddish novelist known by the pseudonym "Der Nister," the Hidden One. And there the story of the painting begins, carrying with it not only a hidden fable by the Hidden One, but also the story of the Ziskind family - from Russia to New Jersey and Vietnam. Dara Horn interweaves mystery, romance, folklore, theology, history, and scripture into a spellbinding modern tale. She brings us on a breathtaking collision course of past, present, and future - revealing both the ordinariness and the beauty of "the world to come." Nestling stories within stories, this is a novel of remarkable clarity and deep inner meaning. Click the book cover above to read more. Matches A Novel by Alan Kaufman October 23, 2005 I have been attracted to Kaufman's writing since he did TattooJew, and JewBoy. I always think of how he would make minyans for a collection of some very unique older Jewish San Franciscans. I am therefore looking forward to reading Matches. I have it in my hand.. but just have to place it in the pile of next books to read, From Publishers Weekly: The title is an Israeli army term for a soldier, or one who "strikes, burns, and dies." Nathan Falk, an American-born Jew and the son of a Holocaust survivor, arrives in Israel seeking "for once, to be generally human, immersed in a kinky-haired majority"-and to do the three years of regular military service and subsequent one-month-a-year reserve duty required of every Israeli male. The narrative falls into 13 Israel Defense Forces patrol vignettes, centered by one novella-size chapter that follows Falk's affair with his best friend's alcoholic girlfriend, along with the honor killing of a 17-year-old Bedouin girl by a man in Falk's (very multi-culti) unit. Throughout, Kaufman (Jew Boy), an American Jew who did multiple IDF tours and now lives in San Francisco, sketches the fault lines of Israeli society as heightened by the highly charged, often violent patrols in the West Bank and Gaza: Sephardic vs. Ashkenazi; native vs. emigr�; Arab vs. Jew. The political turmoil, ruined relationships, coiled anger and psychological damage the patrols leave in their wake is made vivid-and personal-at every turn, as are IDF procedures and moments of unexpected cooperation across borders. As a novel, it's baggy, but the result gives readers a fascinating look at the story behind the numbing newspaper tallies. Click the book cover above to read more. A Time to Run A Novel by Barbara Boxer (U.S. Senator, D, CA) with Mary-Rose Hayes PANTHEON, OCTOBER 2005 Written with a true insider's perspective, A Time to Run is the remarkable literary debut of United States Senator Barbara Boxer, one of the most admired and respected figures on the political scene. Senator Boxer, writing with Mary-Rose Hayes, tells an exciting tale of friendship and betrayal, idealism and pragmatism, in-fighting and public spin. The novel follows Ellen Fines from her days as a college student through romantic entanglements and a difficult marriage to a rising political star. When her husband is killed in a car accident during his campaign for the Senate, Ellen assumes his candidacy and achieves an upset victory over a political machine. On the eve of a crucial vote, past and public worlds collide when Ellen's former lover, now a journalist with strong right-wing connections, gives her sensitive documents that could either make or break her career. From hideaways deep under the U.S. Capitol to wealthy southern California ranches to the political unrest on the streets of Berkeley, lA Time to Run is a great read, and a fascinating, up-close story of power and trust. Click the book cover above to read more. Mrs. Freud A Novel by Nicolle Rosen Arcade Publishing (October 10, 2005) From Booklist: Starred Review In this compelling and painstakingly researched novel, Rosen, a psychiatrist herself, delivers an intimate and telling fictional portrait of Sigmund Freud, as seen through the eyes of his wife, Martha. Rosen allows Freud's aging widow to turn the tables on her famous husband by retrospectively analyzing the twists in the psyche that dominated her life for more than five decades. Through private recollection and through increasingly revelatory letters to an American correspondent, Martha begins to piece together the scattered memories of a marital life often made difficult by the unacknowledged dark spots in her husband's powerful mind. Bit by bit, this long-overawed wife starts to discern the evidence of an irrational mysticism lacing her husband's science; of a curious vulnerability to superstition permeating his hostility to all religion, especially his inherited Judaism; and of a gargantuan ego that resented the slightest show of autonomy by colleagues or family members. But as Martha gropes her way through cloudy memories--innocent of any of the psychoanalytic theories incubated under her roof--it is not finally her husband but herself who comes into focus: a woman whose real talent and intellect were denied any expression by a tyrant who styled himself a revolutionary. A historical novel of exceptional power. Click the book cover above to read more. NOT ME A Novel by Michael Lavigne November 2005, Random House Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, states: "Starred Review Lavigne carves a new portal into the depthless mystery of the Holocaust, writing insightfully and imaginatively about the survival instinct and the thorny love between fathers and sons in a debut even more accomplished than Nicole Krauss' much-hailed Holocaust novel The History of Love (2005). Michael Rosenheim, a smart and endearingly self-deprecating stand-up comic, hides within a fortress of jokes in the wake of the early deaths of his sister and mother and his divorce. Now Heshel, his father, is in a Florida nursing home suffering from Alzheimer's. Holed up in his father's Judaica-festooned apartment, Michael feels as though he has gone through the looking glass as he starts reading a set of old journals. Lavigne alternates with increasing drama between the ruefully funny "live" scenes and the utter hell the blunt diarist describes in chronicling the life of Heinrich Mueller, an SS death camp accountant. As the Allies approach, he steals the identity of a dead Jewish inmate named Heshel Rosenheim and ends up in Israel, where Holocaust survivors fight heroically for a homeland. Performing a phenomenal balancing act between light and dark, past and present, guilt and forgiveness, Lavigne sets in motion profoundly complex moral dilemmas in a vivid, all-consuming, paradoxical, and quintessentially human story." Click the book cover above to read more. LIBERATION A Novel (Hardcover) by JOANNA SCOTT Little Brown (November 2005) From Publishers Weekly: The morning after her 70th birthday party, attended by her dutiful husband and children, Adriana Rundel takes a commuter train from suburban New Jersey to Manhattan, and becomes lost in memories of her WWII girlhood as a Jew in hiding on the Italian isle of Elba. Stealing glances from her hideout in the cupboard, she finds her first love, a young AWOL Senegalese soldier named Amdu Diop, who takes refuge in her family's home during the Allied push toward liberation. He is 17; she is 10. Theirs is an innocent infatuation rather than an intense affair, but that seems to be precisely what Scott (The Manikin) is after: "The truth was she liked Amdu because he was perfectly alive.... She just felt it, the way she felt the warmth of the sun." Their attachment is lovely, but doesn't provide much dramatic lift. And the heart attack Adriana suffers on the train ride into the city, which intermingles her childhood panic with her later-life mortal fear, is less a plot device than a means for integrating the vivid past with the dull present. Still, Scott accomplishes large shifts in time and perspective with grace, and delivers an affecting, unsentimental portrait of a survivor taking stock of her life and loves. Click the book cover above to read more. Christ the Lord : Out of Egypt A novel by Anne Rice NOVEMBER 2005, Knopf Books A Jewish book?? Well.. it sure will be a best seller, and no vampires are contained in the pages. PW writes: "Rice departs from her usual subject matter to pen this curious portrait of a seven-year-old Jesus, who departs Egypt with his family to return home to Nazareth. Rice's painstaking historical research is obvious throughout, whether she's showing the differences among first-century Jewish groups (Pharisees, Essenes and Sadducees all play a part), imagining a Passover pilgrimage to Jerusalem or depicting the regular but violent rebellions by Jews chafing under Roman rule. The book succeeds in capturing Jesus' profound Jewishness, with some of the best scenes reflecting his Torah education and immersion in the oral traditions of the Hebrew Bible. As fiction, though, the book's first half is slow going. Since it is told from Jesus' perspective, the childlike language can be simplistic, though as readers persevere they will discover the riches of the sparse prose Rice adopts. The emotional heart of the story-Jesus' gradual discovery of the miraculous birth his parents have never discussed with him-picks up steam as well, as he begins to understand why he can heal the sick and raise the dead. Rice provides a moving afterword, in which she describes her recent return to the Catholic faith and evaluates, often in an amusingly strident fashion, the state of biblical studies today." Click the book cover above to read more. Love, with Noodles An Amorous Widower's Tale A novel by Harry Freund September 2005. Stockbroker Dan Gelder (60) has a posh Fifth Avenue address, is two years a widower, and remains faithful to his deceased wife. Numbed by grief, he is annoyed-not flattered-by the attentions of the women introduced to him by friends. Then he meets Violet Finkel. And Susan Klein. And Myra Cox. And Tatiana Andrevsky. Violet tempts him with limitless luxury and then with truly profound affection, which he discovers on a journey with her to Jerusalem. But plumpish, pretty Susan offers him cookies in her kitchen, while Myra, an activist dedicated to the cause - and jewelry - of Native Americans, tests the strength of his lower back. Exotic Tatiana weds beauty to mystery, and grace to pride, as she strives to overcome a Russian immigrant's poverty for herself and her young son. Dan's son, Eric, meanwhile, is facing bankruptcy, which Dan can handle more readily than Eric's marriage proposal to the non-Jewish Carol Hoffman. Forced to examine this unexpected crisis in terms of his own faith and his Jewish heritage, Dan at sixty finds that more than his libido has been renewed. This comic, yet wise, delightful novel views the follies and fallibilities of romance at a certain age-serving up love deliciously, with noodles. Click the book cover above to read more. You Are SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah! by Fiona Rosenbloom Hyperion (September 7, 2005) Stacy Friedman is getting ready for one of the most important events of her young life� -- her bat mitzvah! All she wants is the perfect BCBG dress to wear, her friends by her side, and her biggest crush ever, Andy Goldfarb, to dance with her (and maybe even make out with her on the dance floor). But Stacy's plans soon start to fall apart. . . . Her stressed-out mother forces her to buy a hideous beaded sequined dress that she wouldn't be caught dead in. Her mitzvahs are not going at all well. And then the worst thing in the entire world happens -- Stacy catches her best friend, Lydia, making out with Andy! And thus she utters the words that will wreak complete havoc on her social life . . . You are so not invited to my bat mitzvah! Fiona Rosenbloom was born and bred in Rye, New York. When she is not writing, Fiona likes to design and sew her own clothes. If she had her own line, she would call it Fabloom. Unlike the protagonist in this novel, Fiona had little-to-no say about her bat mitzvah dress. Regardless, she still speaks to her mother. Click the book cover above to read more. Goodnight Nobody A Novel by Jennifer Weiner Atria (September 2005) New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Weiner's newest novel tells the story of a young mother's move to a postcard-perfect Connecticut town and the secrets she uncovers there. For Kate Klein, a semi-accidental mother of three, suburbia's been full of unpleasant surprises. Her once-loving husband is hardly ever home. The supermommies on the playground routinely snub her. Her days are spent carpooling and enduring endless games of Candy Land, and at night, most of her orgasms are of the do-it-yourself variety. When a fellow mother is murdered, Kate finds that the unsolved mystery is one of the most interesting things to happen in Upchurch since her neighbors broke ground for a guesthouse and cracked their septic tank. Even though Kate's husband and the police chief warn her that crime-fighting's a job best left to professionals, she can't let it go. So Kate launches an unofficial investigation -- from 8:45 to 11:30 on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, when her kids are in nursery school -- with the help of her hilarious best friend, carpet heiress Janie Segal, and Evan McKenna, a former flame she thought she'd left behind in New York City. As the search for the killer progresses, Kate is drawn deeper into the murdered woman's double life. She discovers the secrets and lies behind Upchurch's placid picket-fence facade -- and the choices and compromises all modern women make as they navigate between independence and obligation, small towns and big cities, being a mother and having a life of one's own. Engrossing, suspenseful, and laugh-out-loud funny, Goodnight Nobody is another unputdownable, timely tale; an insightful mystery with a great heart and a narrator you'll never forget. Click the book cover above to read more. Winkler by Giles Coren September 2005, J. Cape BRIT LIT. A comic account of a man's search for meaning, identity and a suitable response to the burden of history; Coren's examination of the nature of Jewishness (and, incidentally, of Englishness), of the lies we tell to survive and the stresses of urban life, is irreverent, funny, provocative and brave. Click the book cover above to read more. I thought this was party in the BLINTZ ! Oops... it is the Blitz PARTY IN THE BLITZ The English Years (Hardcover) by Elias Canetti September 2005, New Directions Publishing Corporation "It is time for me to turn to England again, for I sense how these memories gradually fade, and it would be a pity if nothing remained of forty years in that country" Exceedingly perceptive, at times amusing and always unpredictable, this autobiography of Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti is a fascinating and enjoyable read. Canetti spent many years in London, beginning in 1939, and during which time he moved in elite circles, numbering the great writers, artists, thinkers and politicians of the time among his friends and acquaintances. In this beautifully written and often sensational collection of portraits of those who were meaningful in his life, Canetti is an honest observer of the personalities of those around him: of T.S. Eliot (whom he detested); of Iris Murdoch (with whom he had a torrid affair) and of the English themselves (whose stiff upper lip he both admired and disparaged). His style is at times staccato, at times elaborately philosophical, but always displays the author's sharp-tongued wit and intelligence. A challenging and rewarding read from the man John Bayley called "the godmonster of Hampstead", this is bound to cause a stir. Elias Canetti arrived in England in 1939, fleeing Hitler, with his wife and (soon) two mistresses. He was known in his adoptive Vienna for a single novel Auto-da-F�, a black comedy of justified paranoia and misogyny. In England he boasted one reader only, sinologist Arthur Waley. His first three autobiographies - which helped win him the 1981 Nobel prize for literature - chronicle Viennese literary life between the wars. Now, 11 years after his death in Z�rich, here are his memoirs of the war years in England. Despite carelessnesses - Herzog von Northumberland stays in German; Margaret Gardiner and JD Bernal were unmarried; it was not Churchill who lost India - they are splendidly entertaining. Canetti's method is to string together small scenes, like beads, into a continuing story. Here are vignettes of London in 1940, of life among Amersham and Hampstead expa

Novels and Fiction (click on a listing for more information, to see the cover art, or to purchase it)

Novels and Fiction
(click on a listing for more information, to see the cover art, or to purchase it)