Eli Pfefferkorn says he was walking in the park one day, thinking about the story he had been longing to tell, when suddenly he experienced a rare and startling revelation. “I found the voice,” he said. “One day, one morning, I heard the voice from inside coming . . . a voice I had not…
Category: Literary
Hot Art: Knelman probes secret world of stolen art
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Some years ago, while researching an article for Walrus Magazine on art theft, Joshua Knelman interviewed a convicted art thief in a local restaurant. While providing some quotable patter, the thief threatened to break Knelman’s legs if he used his real name, and handed him some rolled-up items, which proved to be stolen artworks, now…
Publisher has strong ideological mission
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Nearly a decade after he founded a publishing company with a strong ideological mission, Howard Rotberg may take his place among that small and proud group of Canadians who operate successful small publishing houses. Although Mantua Books started off slowly, it now publishes one new title each month. Some of the books sell tens of…
Abram’s latest crime novel features hard-boiled cop
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As a volunteer for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the organization created by filmmaker Steven Spielberg, author Alvin Abram gained first-hand knowledge of the experiences of Holocaust survivors. In his recently published seventh book, The Minyan, Abram combines his flare for detective crime mysteries with a story about the Holocaust, featuring locales…
Benevolence is latest novel from Cynthia Holz
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Bernard Wasserman and Renata Moon, the central characters in Benevolence, are a middle-aged, childless couple straining to regain their former closeness even as they struggle with barriers that separate them from their clients in their professional lives, he as a doctor who assesses patients involved in organ transplants, she as a psychotherapist who helps patients…
Pre-1950 Jewish Toronto manuscript published
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A 60-year-old manuscript titled The Rise of the Toronto Jewish Community has been found in the archives of Beth Tzedec Congregation. Ralph Berrin, a volunteer in the Beth Tzedec Museum, brought the manuscript to the attention of Bill Gladstone, the publisher of Now and Then Books. Gladstone identified the author as the late Shmuel Mayer…
100 Years Ago: Toronto’s Dickens society in 1912
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From the Star Weekly, February 3, 1912 Toronto boasts the largest Dickens society in the world Centenary of Famous Novelist Will Be Celebrated with Much Feeling Next Wednesday — Over 1,000 Members in Dickens Fellowship Next Wednesday (February 7, 1912), the centenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, will be celebrated throughout the English-speaking world…
New story collection from Nathan Englander
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You remember Nathan Englander. He’s the former yeshiva bocher turned short story writer who dazzled the critics about a dozen years ago with For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, a debut collection of stories that inspired raves and comparisons to Babel, Malamud and Singer. Not even his subsequent novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, could…
Mature writer Jacqueline Park scores with first novel
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After a distinguished career as a television scriptwriter and a professor of dramatic writing, Winnipeg-born Jacqueline Park, at 72, has achieved every writer’s dream: an acclaimed and commercially successful first novel. The book, a sweeping historical epic of the Italian Renaissance, is called The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi. Published by the prestigious American…
Singer’s literary legacy appraised at his centenary
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In the early 1920s, a young man who proofread copy for a Yiddish literary magazine in Warsaw asked the editor to consider publishing a short story he’d written. After due consideration, the editor said he found the story greatly flawed, but would publish it anyhow. And what was wrong with it? the brash novice wanted…
