In 1859 a London literary professor, David Masson, made a notable attempt to classify the novel, which was still a relatively young phenomenon, into distinct categories or genres. Influenced by Aristotle, Masson mapped out 13 different categories of novel. As if anticipating the work of Northrup Frye a century later, he also presented a unified…
Quick: can you name two prominent authors who made stunning literary debuts while still in their early 20s, each with an effervescent and picaresque first novel that contains a set of smaller stories within the novelistic framework? Hint: one is contemporary Jewish-American, the other British Victorian. Hailed by the New York-based Forward newspaper as one…
I picked up the New Yorker’s Summer Fiction Issue recently, delighted to see that Nathan Englander, the 29-year-old author of the recent short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, had made it onto that magazine’s list of 20 Writers for the 21st Century. This comes as no great surprise. Englander’s first published work…
It has been 50 years since Winnipeg-born writer Adele Wiseman scored the highly impressive professional coup of winning the Governor General’s literary award for her first novel, The Sacrifice. But Wiseman, who was 28 in 1956 and widely considered to be at the start of a very promising career as a novelist, disappointed the expectations…
Chava Rosenfarb, the celebrated Yiddish writer who has lived in Canada for more than half a century, has finally seen one of her books get published in her adoptive homeland. With the publication in 2005 of Survivors (Cormorant Books), a collection of seven short stories about Holocaust survivors, Toronto-based Cormorant Books has become the first…
A compelling short story anthology, Found Treasures: Stories By Yiddish Women Writers (Second Story Press, 1994) has sold more than 5,000 copies and has thus attained the status of a Canadian bestseller. The book has gone into a second printing and, according to co-editor Frieda Forman of Toronto, has been picked up as an alternate…
In Love and Exile, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s revealing autobiographical trilogy, he describes an early story, “In the World of Chaos,” that was never published. Its hero “was nothing less than a corpse who didn’t know that he was dead,” Singer recounted. “He wandered across Poland, attended fairs, called on rabbis, even allowed himself to be…
Seven years after the death of Isaac Bashevis Singer and 20 years after he won the Nobel Prize for literature, the literary world has produced three significant new books by and about the man who is one of the most important and popular Jewish writers of modern times. The last few months have seen the…
Call It Sleep — what else might one call the hiatus of 60 years that Henry Roth took between publication of his first now-classic novel Call It Sleep (1934) and his next, A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park (1994)? Now sleeping the sleep of the eternal, Roth left us with six semi-autobiographical novels that…
“Dis a choych?” These three little words, which appear in Abraham Cahan’s sparkling story The Imported Bridegroom (1898), may be among the most sublimely ironic utterances in all of modern Jewish literature. The story opens with the unmarried Flora idly reading Little Dorrit as her wealthy father, Asriel Stroon, prepares to visit Pravly, his childhood…
