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| August 26, 2005 |
Finding new meaning in 9/11
The new novel The Days of Awe by Hugh Nissenson is the latest in a string of fiction books to come out that explore life in a post-9/11 era including Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
In The Days of Awe, the story opens in August 2001 in Manhattan where the protagonist Artie Rubin has just turned 67. His friends are beginning to die off one by one -- and his wife of 40 years has just been told she's at a high risk for a heart attack.
As the summer progresses, Rubin, an illustrator, is hard at work on his next book (a retelling of Norse myths). He finds out that his only daughter is pregnant, he goes to synagogue occasionally, and reads about the current cycle of violence in Israel. He even pops a Viagra once a week to sleep with his wife and happily plans their anniversary trip to Venice.
Then comes the morning of 9/11 and everything changes. Yes, we've heard the story a dozen times before, but somehow in Artie's voice it all sounds new again.
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| August 11, 2005 |
Making a statement
From Newsweek, a report about a new book by a really funny Jewish author:
Author Amy Borkowsky hasn't yet had to look outside her apartment for inspiration. Material for her first book, Amy's Answering Machine (Atria, 2001) came from a drawer of old answering machine tapes filled with hilarious messages from her over-protective mother. And for her latest memoir, Statements: True Tales of Life, Love, and Credit Card Bills, (Chamberlain Bros. 2005) she dug into boxes under her bed and found more than a decade of credit card statements. Since she uses plastic for just about every purchase, the bills are a surprisingly intimate portrait of her life as a young, single woman in New York. (She won't give her current age, saying only that her American Express card says that she's been a card member since '87. But, she insists that on a good day, she can "pass for a member since '97.")
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