Staff Picks
Celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month With These Adult Titles
- Sarah C.
- Thursday, May 02
Collection
Check out these books by Jewish American authors!
Pitch Dark
Published in 2013
""What's new. What else. What next. What's happened here." Pitch Dark, Renata Adler's follow-up to her prizewinning novel Speedboat, is a book of questions. It is also a book of false starts, red herrings, misunderstandings, and all-too-fleeting revelations. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in her affair with a married lover, a fraught relationship that reverberates throughout the novel, as it moves from Kate's house in rural Connecticut and her New York City brownstone apartment, to a small island off the coast of Washington, and to an utterly dark road in a remote corner of Ireland. Told in Adler's celebrated fragmented style, and constructed from the bare-bones language of everyday life, Pitch Dark transcends its parts to come to the kind of self-knowledge achievable only after a relentless quest"-- Provided by publisher.
Baumgartner
A Novel
Published in 2023
"Paul Auster's brilliant eighteenth novel opens with a scorched pot of water, which Sy Baumgartner-phenomenologist, noted author, and soon-to-be retired philosophy professor-has just forgotten on the stove. Baumgartner's life had been defined by his deep, abiding love for his wife, Anna, who was killed in a swimming accident nine years earlier. Now 71, Baumgartner continues to struggle to live in her absence as the novel sinuously unfolds into spirals of memory and reminiscence, delineated in episodes spanning from 1968, when Sy and Anna meet as broke students working and writing in New York, through their passionate relationship over the next forty years, and back to Baumgartner's youth in Newark and his Polish-born father's life as a dress-shop owner and failed revolutionary. Rich with compassion, wit, and Auster's keen eye for beauty in the smallest, most transient details of ordinary life, Baumgartner asks: Why do we remember certain moments, and forget others?"-- Provided by publisher.
Summer Sisters
A Novel
Published in 2003
A poor girl overcomes temptation and succeeds in life. It happens when she befriends a rich girl whose father offers to pay her college tuition. It is not easy, the rich one, now turned playgirl, tempting her away from studies with boys.
Fleishman is in Trouble
A Novel
Published in 2019
"Dr. Toby Fleishman wakes up each morning surrounded by women. Women who are self-actualized and independent and know what they want--and, against all odds, what they want is Toby. Who knew what kind of life awaited him once he finally extracted himself from his nightmare of a marriage? Who knew that there were women out there who would actually look at him with softness and desire? But just as the winds of his optimism are beginning to pick up, they're quickly dampened, and then extinguished, when his ex-wife, Rachel, suddenly disappears. Toby thought he knew what to expect when he moved out: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, tense co-parenting negotiations. He never thought that one day Rachel would just drop their children off at his place and never come back. As Toby tries to figure out what happened and what it means, all while juggling his patients at the hospital, his never-ending parental duties, and his new, app-assisted sexual popularity, his tidy narrative of a spurned husband is his sole consolation. But if Toby ever wants to really understand where Rachel went and what really happened to his marriage, he is going to have to consider that he might not have seen it all that clearly in the first place. A searing, funny, and electric debut from one of the most exciting writers working today, Fleishman Is In Trouble is an exploration of a culture trying to navigate the fault lines of an institution that has proven to be worthy of both our great wariness and our great optimism"-- Provided by publisher.
The Best Assassination in the Nation
Published in 2021
"Benjamin Gold is damaged goods. After he cracked up in the war and was discharged into a psych ward, his rich wife dumped him. Right after that, the white-shoe law firm that never hired Jews dumped him too; without powerful in-laws, it didn't matter how many cases he won or how much he shortened his name. Unemployable as a lawyer, he wound up working as a private eye - and not exactly at the top of the profession. Drunk and anorectic, his only remaining friends are bartenders and bottles. After a long string of jilted wives and small-time scams, Gold isn't expecting the beautiful daughter of his legal hero to show up in his office. Especially not with a crazy theory that her father - recently shot dead, supposedly in a random robbery - was in fact assassinated by order of Cleveland's biggest tycoon, Clayton Forsythe.To prove Judith Sorin's case, Benjamin Gold has to navigate a web of lies and evasion, a legal establishment that's been bought and paid for, disappearing witnesses, the FBI, surprisingly polite thugs, and the Forsythes - who just happen to be his former in-laws. A tall order for anyone, and Benny Goldstein has never been lucky.."--Publisher.
My Avant-garde Education
A Memoir
Published in 2015
In this lively memoir, art critic and writer Cooper retraces his youth, up to and including the period of his intellectual awakening during the heyday of conceptual art, and vividly recalls his experiences as a son, brother, student, and closeted young gay man. Alternately funny and touching, the book chronicles Cooper's adolescence in 1960s Los Angeles, including the moment he fell in love with pop art in his middle school library, and his young adulthood in New York, where he studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, as well as the years he spent studying under the likes of Allan Kaprow and the poet and visual artist Emmett Williams at CalArts. Throughout, Cooper draws interesting connections between his suppressed sexuality and the period's radical reexamination of the art object, observing, "The stronger and more tangible my longing for men, the more adamantly I crusaded for art's dematerialization." Offbeat characters and comic incidents richly animate Cooper's narrative, as do his recollections of compelling seminars and performance pieces at CalArts. Toward the end of the memoir, short chapters offer a glimpse into his career as an art critic and writer, as well as the losses he suffered during the AIDS epidemic. Readers interested in conceptualism will especially value these personal reflections during such a critical moment in the recent history of art.
The Red Tent
A Novel
Published in 2014
The story of Dinah, a tragic character from the Bible whose great love, a prince, is killed by her brother, leaving her alone and pregnant. The novel traces her life from childhood to death, in the process examining sexual and religious practices of the day, and what it meant to be a woman.
Dinner at the Center of the Earth
Published in 2017
"The best work yet from the Pulitzer finalist and best-selling author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges--a political thriller that unfolds in the highly charged territory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and pivots on the complex relationship between a secret prisoner and his guard. A prisoner in a secret cell. The guard who has watched over him a dozen years. An American waitress in Paris. A young Palestinian man in Berlin who strikes up an odd friendship with a wealthy Canadian businessman. And The General, Israel's most controversial leader, who lies dying in a hospital, the only man who knows of the prisoner's existence. From these vastly different lives Nathan Englander has woven a powerful, intensely suspenseful portrait of a nation riven by insoluble conflict, even as the lives of its citizens become fatefully and inextricably entwined--a political thriller of the highest order that interrogates the anguished, violent division between Israelis and Palestinians, and dramatizes the immense moral ambiguities haunting both sides. Who is right, who is wrong--who is the guard, who is truly the prisoner? A tour de force from one of America's most acclaimed voices in contemporary fiction"-- Provided by publisher.
Clark Gifford's Body
Published in 2007
Clark Gifford is a disaffected politician in a nameless, media-driven modern state where representative politics has dwindled to the corrupt transaction of business as usual, and a foreign war is always breaking out on the horizon. One night Gifford and some of his followers seize radio stations to broadcast a call for freedom -- a rebellion that is immediately put down by the government and whose motive will remain forever obscure. Even so, it leads to twenty years of war.
Everything is Illuminated
A Novel
Published in 2003
Hilarious, energetic, and profoundly touching, a debut novel follows a young writer as he travels to the farmlands of Eastern Europe, where he embarks on a quest to find Augustine, the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis, and, guided by his young Ukrainian translator, he discovers an unexpected past that will resonate far into the future. With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man, also named Jonathan Safran Foer, sets out to find the woman who may or may not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war; an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior; and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past. By turns comic and tragic, but always passionate, wildly inventive, and touched with an indelible humanity, this debut novel is a powerful, deeply felt story of searching: for the past, family, and truth.
Conversations with Beethoven
Published in 2014
Just before his death, Sanford Friedman completed this, his final novel, something entirely different from anything he, or for that matter anyone, had written before - Conversations with Beethoven, a moving meditation on greatness and pettiness, vulnerability and genius, that is as elegiac as it is witty and engaging.
Growing Up Absurd
Problems of Youth in the Organized Society
Published in 2012
"Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd was a runaway best seller when it was first published in 1960, and it became one of the defining texts of the New Left. Goodman was a writer and thinker who broke every mold and did it brilliantly -- he was a novelist, poet, and a social theorist, among a host of other things -- and the book{u2019}s surprise success established him as one of America's most unusual and trenchant critics, combining vast learning, an astute mind, utopian sympathies, and a wonderfully hands-on way with words. For Goodman, the unhappiness of young people was a concentrated form of the unhappiness of American society as a whole, run by corporations that provide employment (if and when they do) but not the kind of meaningful work that engages body and soul. Goodman saw the young as the first casualties of a humanly repressive social and economic system and, as such, the front line of potential resistance. Noam Chomsky has said, 'Paul Goodman's impact is all about us,' and certainly it can be felt in the powerful localism of today's renascent left. A classic of anarchist thought, Growing Up Absurd not only offers a penetrating indictment of the human costs of corporate capitalism but points the way forward. It is a tale of yesterday's youth that speaks directly to our common future."--Publisher's description.
Unfinished Business
Notes of a Chronic Re-reader
Published in 2020
"A series of essays exploring the different books that shaped Gornick throughout her life"-- Provided by publisher.
Catch-22
Published in 2011
Set in the closing months of World War II in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, Catch-22 is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never even met keep trying to kill him.
Practical Magic
Published in 2003
For more than two hundred years, the Owens women had been blamed for everything that went wrong in their Massachusetts town. And Gillian and Sally endured that fate as well; as children, the sisters were outsiders. Their elderly aunts almost seemed to encourage the whispers of witchery, but all Gillian and Sally wanted was to escape. One would do so by marrying, the other by running away. But the bonds they shared brought them back, almost as if by magic ...
A Voice Still Heard
Selected Essays of Irving Howe
Published in 2014
Man of letters, political critic, public intellectual, Irving Howe was one of America's most exemplary and embattled writers. Since his death in 1993 at age 72, Howe's work and his personal example of commitment to high principle, both literary and political, have had a vigorous afterlife. This posthumous and capacious collection includes twenty-six essays that originally appeared in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Nation. Taken together, they reveal the depth and breadth of Howe's enthusiasms and range over politics, literature, Judaism, and the tumults of American society.
Flowers for Algernon
Published in 2005
With more than five million copies sold, "Flowers for Algernon is the beloved, classic story of a mentally disabled man whose experimental quest for intelligence mirrors that of Algernon, an extraordinary lab mouse. In poignant diary entries, Charlie tells how a brain operation increases his IQ and changes his life. As the experimental procedure takes effect, Charlie's intelligence expands until it surpasses that of the doctors who engineered his metamorphosis. The experiment seems to be a scientific breakthrough of paramount importance--until Algernon begins his sudden, unexpected deterioration. Will the same happen to Charlie? An American classic that inspired the award-winning movie Charly.
Great House
Published in 2010
Connected solely by a desk of enormous dimension and many drawers that exerts a power over those who possess it or give it away, three people--a lonely American novelist clinging to the memory of a poet who has mysteriously vanished in Chile, an old man in Israel facing the imminent death of his wife of 51 years, and an esteemed antiques dealer tracking down the things stolen from his father by the Nazis--struggle to create a meaningful permanence in the face of inevitable loss.
The Fran Lebowitz Reader
Published in 1994
The Fran Lebowitz Reader brings together in one volume, with a new preface, two bestsellers, Metropolitan Life and Social Studies, by an "important humorist in the classic tradition" (The New York Times Book Review) who is "the natural successor to Dorothy Parker" (British Vogue). In "elegant, finely honed prose" (The Washington Post Book World), Lebowitz limns the vicissitudes of contemporary urban life?its fads, trends, crazes, morals, and fashions. By turns ironic, facetious, deadpan, sarcastic, wry, wisecracking, and waggish, she is always wickedly entertaining. --publisher.
The Fixer
Published in 2004
In Tsarist Russia, Yakov is accused of a ritual murder he did not commit.
Devil in a Blue Dress
In a Los Angeles bar, "Easy" Rawlins, a black war veteran just fired from his job, wonders how he'll pay his mortgage. DeWitt Albright, a quietly vicious white man, walks in and offers Easy good money if he'll find Daphne Monet.
Mad Honey
A Novel
Published in 2022
"Olivia McAfee knows what it feels like to start over. Her picture-perfect life-living in Boston, married to a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon, raising a beautiful son, Asher-was upended when her husband revealed a darker side. She never imagined she would end up back in her sleepy New Hampshire hometown, living in the house she grew up in, and taking over her father's beekeeping business. Lily Campanello is familiar with do-overs, too. When she and her mom relocate to Adams, New Hampshire, for her final year of high school, they both hope it will be a fresh start. And for just a short while, these new beginnings are exactly what Olivia and Lily need. Their paths cross when Asher falls for the new girl in school, and Lily can't help but fall for him, too. With Ash, she feels happy for the first time. Yet at times, she wonders if she can she trust him completely . . . Then one day, Olivia receives a phone call: Lily is dead, and Asher is being questioned by the police. Olivia is adamant that her son is innocent. But she would be lying if she didn't acknowledge the flashes of his father's temper in him, and as the case against him unfolds, she realizes he's hidden more than he's shared with her"-- Publisher's description.
Heartwood
A Novel
Published in 2011
Though Iris Stern considers herself a modern woman, with a successful academic career and a happy marriage, she still holds steadfast to her old-fashioned sensibilities. But as the mother of three adult children, each with their own lives and burdens to bear, she often finds those sensibilities called into question when confronted with the choices her children have made.
The Chosen
Published in 1967
It is the now-classic story of two fathers and two sons and the pressures on all of them to pursue the religion they share in the way that is best suited to each. And as the boys grow into young men, they discover in the other a lost spiritual brother, and a link to an unexplored world that neither had ever considered before. In effect, they exchange places, and find the peace that neither will ever retreat from again. . . .
Atlas Shrugged
Published in 2005
This is the story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world, and did. Is he a destroyer or a liberator? Why does he have to fight his battle not against his enemies but against those who need him most? Why does he fight his hardest battle against the woman he loves? The answers to these questions become clear when the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the amazing men and women in this remarkable book is uncovered . Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, "Atlas shrugged" is Ayn Rand's magnum opus, and a premier moral apologia for Capitalism.
The Catcher in the Rye
Published in 1951
In an effort to escape the hypocrisies of life at his boarding school, sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield seeks refuge in New York City.
The Young Lions
Published in 2000
"Portrays the experiences of ordinary soldiers fighting in World War II. Using the points of view of a perceptive young Nazi, a jaded American film producer, and a shy Jewish boy just married to the love of his life.
Our Country Friends
A Novel
Published in 2021
"It's March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next few months new bonds of friendship and love will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge among this unlikely cast of characters, each richly drawn and achingly human: a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a young flame-thrower of an essayist, originally from the Carolinas; and a movie star, The Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family"-- Provided by publisher.
The Village Idiot
A Novel
Published in 2022
A fictionalized account of the life of expressionist painter Chaim Soutine follows his life and career in Paris, his friendship with Amedeo Modigliani, his sudden success and rise to fame, and his flight from the Nazi occupation of France.
The Haj
Published in 1984
"Leon Uris returns to the land of his acclaimed best-seller Exodus for an epic story of hate and love, vengeance and forgiveness and forgiveness. The Middle East is the powerful setting for this sweeping tale of a land where revenge is sacred and hatred noble. Where an Arab ruler tries to save his people from destruction but cannot save them from themselves. When violence spreads like a plague across the lands of Palestine--this is the time of The Haj."--Publisher.
The Pawnbroker
A Novel
Published in 2015
For most of us, remembering the Holocaust requires effort; we listen to stories, watch films, read histories. But the people who came to be called "survivors" could not avoid their memories. Sol Nazerman, protagonist of Edward Lewis Wallant's The Pawnbroker, is one such sufferer. At 45, Nazerman, who survived Bergen-Belsen although his wife and children did not, runs a Harlem pawnshop. But the operation is only a front for a gangster who pays Nazerman a comfortable salary for his services. Nazerman's dreams are haunted by visions of his past tortures. (Dramatizations of these scenes in Sidney Lumet's 1964 film version are famous for being the first time the extermination camps were depicted in a Hollywood movie.) Remarkable for its attempts to dramatize the aftereffects of the Holocaust, The Pawnbroker is likewise valuable as an exploration of the fraught relationships between Jews and other American minority groups. That this novel, a National Book Award finalist, remains so powerful today makes it all the more tragic that its talented author died, at age 36, the year after its publication.
The Lawgiver
Published in 2012
Margo Solovei, a brilliant young writer-director has rejected her rabbinical father's strict Jewish upbringing to pursue a career in the arts. When an Australian multi-billionaire promises to finance a movie about Moses if the script meets certain standards, Margo does everything she can to land the job, including a reunion with her estranged first love, an influential lawyer with whom she still has unfinished business.
Bread Givers
Published in 2023
"The youngest of four daughters in a family that left Poland in the 1920s for the crowded tenements of New York City's Lower East Side, Sara Smolinsky has seen her sisters resign themselves under their rabbi father's iron fist to loveless marriages and empty futures. They are bread givers, working to feed the family while their father studies the Torah--according to which, as their father reminds them, a woman without her father or husband is less than nothing. But Sarah hungers for more and in defiance of her father she breaks free and escapes home to see what the American dream holds for her in this poignant coming-of-age tale and striking portrait of feminist rebellion"-- Provided by publisher.