Books & Authors
85 posts found
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Gina Nahai's 'Greetings from Teherangeles'
Gina Nahai's 'Greetings from Teherangeles' - Forbes... View Original Article -
UCLA Israel Studies Honors Amoz Oz
UCLA Israel Studies Honors Amoz OZ - Forbes View Original Article -
What Jonathan Alter Thinks about Our President
June 18, 2013 Jonathan Alter’s “The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies” (Simon and Schuster), an account of the president’s reelection campaign and the challenges posed by the Republican’s obstructionist politics, has been on the New York Times Best Sellers list for several weeks. We recently spoke to the columnist for Bloomberg View about the president, the 2012 campaign and the future of political journalism. The following is an edited version of our conversation. TOM TEICHOLZ: Three years ago, you… -
The Remarkable Life and Times of George Plimpton
The groundbreaking journalist taught me one of life's most important lessons: You never have to be afraid to be yourself June 17, 2013 Recent months have seen a resurgence in all things George Plimpton (journalist and founding editor of The Paris Review), with the release of a documentary, "Plimpton!" as well as the paperback edition of "George Being George." Why should we care? What makes Plimpton so interesting to us now? For one thing, we have Plimpton to thank for… -
Etgar Keret: The Long and Very Short of Fiction
Posted: 11/04/2013 4:32 pm Etgar Keret, with his collections The Nimrod Flip-Out and the recently published Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, reinvigorated the short story (and the short, short story). The author, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope and on This American Life, recently spent a day in Los Angles, at UCLA, as a guest of the Israel Studies department, and at a reception in his honor at the home of Sharon Nazarian, president of the… -
Inside the Gossip Industrial Complex
George Rush and Joanna Molloy's "SCANDAL: A Manual, The Inside Story of America's Infamous Gossip Columnists" (Skyhorse/Norton) is the most fun read I've had all year -- possibly in several years. It is a delicious look behind the curtain of New York's gossip media industrial complex, the players and the played, and how rival columns and columnists at the Daily News and The New York Post do battle and have been forced to evolve in an Internet/ Matt… -
Belllow by way of Bellow
Sons of famous fathers rarely eclipse their parent. Although there are some notable exceptions (JFK and Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes come to mind), the singularity of purpose, the ruthlessness that lead to lasting renown, as well as the perks and vicissitudes that come with fame, none of these reward excellent parenting nor allow children the same crucible to ignite a flame that might burn brighter than their parent’s. That children of the famous write memoirs is common; that they… -
Chabon's Reconnect
Michael Chabon. Photo courtesy of HarperCollins. A writer walks into a room full of rabbis. This sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it’s not. In the words of Woody Allen’s “Broadway Danny Rose,” “It’s the emes.” The Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) held the Reform movement’s annual rabbinical convention March 3-6 in Long Beach, and novelist and essayist Michael Chabon was this year’s Jacob Rader Marcus lecturer. He spoke on the topic “Shaping Jewish Narrative” with Rabbi… -
sex,sex,sex
Portrait of Arthur Schnitzler, Atelier Madame d’Ora, 1915. Image courtesy of ONB/Vienna, 203.759-D One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons features two men in conversation walking down a city street. Surrounding them are dollar signs — in every window, on every car, on everything. The caption reads: “Remember when everything was sex, sex, sex?” This image came to mind the other afternoon at a dramatic reading by Annabelle Gurwitch and Sam Tsoutsouvas of “Arthur Schnitzler — Being Jewish,” a work… -
Jonathan Foer’s ‘New American Haggadah’: Extremely Similar and Incredibly the Same
The haggadah, the user's manual to the Passover seder, might be the world's oldest annually practiced ritual, and the story of the Jews' freedom from slavery in Egypt is, Jonathan Safran Foer said recently, "the best-known greatest continuously read story" in book form. And yet, just like there isn't a singer who doesn't think he can cover a Bob Dylan song better than Dylan himself, the haggadah remains the book that everyone thinks they can improve on. The "Maxwell House… -
A Danielewski Halloween
[caption id="attachment_365" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Photo by Ricardo Miranda "][/caption] On Halloween this year, instead of being the best sugar pusher in the neighborhood, or following your inappropriately costumed progeny as they amass their candy fortunes, or abandoning your own hard-earned dignity for a night of brew-fueled revelry, let me steer the adults amongst you to REDCAT, the CalArts downtown theater at Walt Disney Concert Hall, where for one night only, Mark Z. Danielewski will conduct a staged reading with shadow… -
Lost & Found: What Wasserstein Hid, New Bio Reveals
When the Pulitzer- and Tony Award-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein - beloved for her plays "The Heidi Chronicles," "The Sisters Rosensweig" and "Isn't it Romantic?" - died in 2006 at age 55, Broadway dimmed its lights in her honor. Five years later, Julie Salamon's page-turning biography "Wendy and the Lost Boys" (The Penguin Press: $29.95) sheds light on the public and private selves of this author, whose own family dramas were no less gripping than those she wrote for the stage.…