Stories We Tell: What it Takes to Get in
The Mandela Plot
Adolescence, otherness, and Apartheid make a literally explosive cocktail in National Jewish Book Award winner Kenneth Bonert’s new novel, The Mandela Plot. Half hyperbolic adventure and half historical fiction, Bonert elevates his unlikely hero, Martin Helger, to almost mythic status, while reminding readers both of South Africa’s Jewish diaspora and the horrors of Apartheid.
Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death
Nearly 40 years have passed since Dan White, a disgruntled political rival, shot and killed San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, and Mayor George Moscone in their City Hall offices
I, Sarah Steinway
The specter of a flood-swept future is all too easy to envision. In the past two years alone, catastrophic floods have inundated parts of Maryland, Texas, and Louisiana
The Comedown
There is pleasure to be had in a work of fiction whose scope spans two generations. Characters are introduced or shown in flashbacks as children, and we see how they fulfill – or don’t – the expectations placed on them by their parents, or how traumas they experience later come to bear. In The Comedown (Henry Holt) – as in Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi’s recent epic of the African diaspora, or Amy Tan’s classic The Joy Luck Club – Rebekah Frumkin explores the ways in which choices made by parents echo through children and grandchildren for decades
Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling
In Life in Culture: Selected Letters of Lionel Trilling (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), literary critic and poet Adam Kirsch presents us with a collection of 270 letters spanning the period from 1924 to 1975, the year of literary critic Lionel Trilling’s death at the age of 70. The letters are organized in chronological order rather than thematically, juxtaposing love letters to his wife Diana (an important literary critic in her own right) to discourses on his favorite British authors, to dealings with his psychoanalysts.
Shadow Strike
The U.S. and Israel, allies for more than 70 years, are sometimes at odds on specific policies and actions. Yaakov Katz’s new book Shadow Strike: Inside Israel's Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power (St. Martin’s Press) details one such disagreement involving a high-stakes threat to Israel in 2007.
Anna and Tranquillo: Catholic Anxiety and Jewish Protest in the Age of Revolutions
This books tells the story of the Papal State’s 300-year effort to forcibly convert the Jews of Rome to Catholicism. The officially sanctioned campaign included kidnapping youngsters, harsh incarceration, and mind manipulation.
The Guest Book
Sarah Blake’s The Guest Book (Flatiron Books) spans three generations of an old-line Protestant family, the Miltons, whose manners and way of life represent what they believe to be the established and correct way of doing things.