Books & Authors
85 posts found
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Let Us Travel To Iran
This fall, I am asking you to travel to Iran. Not the present-day, front-page, headline-grabbing, nuclear-developing, Holocaust-denying, Israel-hating Iran, but the Iran of just 20 or 30 years ago, as described in two newly published novels, Gina Nahai's "Caspian Rain" (MacAdam Cage) and Dalia Sofer's "The Septembers of Shiraz" (Ecco). Although Nahai's novel takes place over the decade leading up to the 1979 Iranian revolution and Sofer's in the years immediately following it, both are beautifully written, absorbing and moving… -
GOOD AS (Jonathan) GOLD
"The plov is great." Jonathan Gold, the LA Weekly's restaurant critic and the 2007 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, e-mailed me the above about Uzbekistan (the restaurant on La Brea, not the country), where we were planning to meet. He assumed, of course, that I knew what plov is -- I didn't then, but I do now; it's a rice dish, like pilaf, usually made with lamb and cooked in a pot. It's common in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and… -
The Next Conversation
Can a conversation inspire a city? A people? Nextbook, an organization devoted to Jewish literature, culture and ideas (www.nextbook.org) came to L.A. last weekend, staging a full day festival at UCLA's MacGowan and Freud theaters called "Acting Jewish: Film, TV, Comedy, Music," the first of what it hopes to be an annual event. According to Nextbook Director Julie Sandorf, the notion of an L.A. festival was inspired by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, filmmaker and author David Mamet, whose book, "The Wicked… -
FOODIE-ISM (Barry Glassner & "The Gospel of Food")
This time of year finds me on the treadmill in the mornings, futzing around the gym, taking walks around the neighborhood, eating lots of grilled chicken salads. I'm in training -- not for the recent Los Angeles Marathon, but for the marathon weekend in May when my wife and I travel to another city with several like-minded couples without our kids to spend time listening to music and eating, eating, eating. New Orleans is a favorite destination; this year, for… -
My Punk Self
Recently I asked a 15-year-old boy what music he listened to. His answer: "No one you ever heard of." A perfect answer. Because what every fan needs, what every person should have, is music that is his own. Over the years, there's been a lot of music that has mattered to me. That I have enjoyed; that I have loved. But if you asked me what music was mine -- I would name without hesitation a bunch of bands that… -
Literary Paprika (Mark Sarvas and 'The Elegant Variation')
What better way to start the New Year than by sprinkling a little literary paprika? Consider this: Mark Sarvas, a New York-born son of Hungarian parents, a voracious reader, a Francophile and a foodie, comes to Los Angeles to be a writer, sells some screenplays and starts an acclaimed literary blog, The Elegant Variation (marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar ). To top it all off, Sarvas has just completed his first novel, as yet untitled and currently being submitted to publishers. "Yoy Ishtenem!" If… -
Mamet's Question
David Mamet has written a book, "The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred and the Jews" (Shocken/Nextbook), that is by turns bold, courageous, and outrageous -- it is a book that calls Diaspora Jews to the table and asks: "In or Out?" "The underlying premise of the book," Mamet told me recently, "is to all Jews: If you can't say of your fellow Jews ' my people,' get out of my way; I don't want to know you, because our people are… -
A Passion for War (Steve Rubin)
To meet him, you might think Steven Rubin is a normal person. Tall, handsome, happily married with young children, he is personable, affable -- in short, one of the gentlest and nicest guys you could meet. But he is a man obsessed with war -- World War II to be precise. Recently, Rubin launched www.ww2daily.com, a Web site that posts a daily broadcast of the news that occurred on that day during World War II. Rubin began posting his broadcasts… -
Hate the Game, Love The Player (Michael Tolkin and "The Return of The Player")
The fall season is upon us, with new books, movies and TV programs all vying for our attention as palliatives to the news of war, terrorism and melting ice caps. Even as the days get shorter and our own day of judgment looms imminent, we wonder: Is there a hero out there who can set us back on the path of reason, on a course of love, someone to heal us and show us the way -- someone, who is,… -
Life vs. Death
In college, I wrote the same literature essay over and over again. Regardless of the novel, its plot or its country of origin, I found that I could always work up four pages on the subject of "Life vs. Death." My ideas on this subject were not particularly original. In a high school English class, some intellectually precocious seniors had made impassioned references to Norman O. Brown's "Life Against Death" and Freud's discussion of the life force vs. the death… -
A Little Respect (for Jewish journalism)
For the 20th anniversary issue of The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, it was suggested that I write a column about Jewish journalism. Herewith the result: Jewish journalism is a much-maligned enterprise -- it cries out like the late Rodney Dangerfield for respect. No one really admits to reading a Jewish newspaper. "It comes to my home," is what most people tell me. Or they claim to read it only when they can't get their hands on anything else. "I… -
Grossman's Fate
The recent publication of "A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman With the Red Army, 1941-1945" (Pantheon) brings attention to a writer who deserves to be better known and whose personal story illuminates the tragic dimension of Russian Jewry during the Communist era. Grossman (1905-1964) was a journalist as well as the author of short stories and novels, most notably "Life and Fate," which is to be reissued this spring by New York Review of Books (NYRB) Classics. His reporting during…