This immensely moving coming-of-age story and historical epic is about an elderly blind rabbi – a twice-displaced victim of the Portuguese Inquisition – and Esther, an orphaned Jewish girl, newly arrived from Amsterdam to plague-ridden London of the 1660s, who secretly becomes the rabbi’s student and scribe.
While finishing my own coming-of-age novel about a Jewish boy and his multiple mentors, it was particularly powerful to read this brilliantly realized character study of a young woman at an earlier inflection point in Jewish history, challenging her mentor and the greatest minds of the age.
The Weight of Ink is terrifically evocative of its time and place, and I read it while traveling in Amsterdam and London, which couldn’t have been more perfect.
WINNER OF A NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD A USA TODAY BESTSELLER "A gifted writer, astonishingly adept at nuance, narration, and the politics of passion."-Toni Morrison Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history. As the novel opens, Helen has been summoned by a former student to view a…
Every time I read a Murakami novel, I go into a trance. The language is simple, the images hallucinatory, and the ideas seem straightforward yet enigmatic.
I started the year with the fantastic maze of artistic and sexual mysteries in Killing Commendatore and ended it with Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. This is an intimate story of a young man who once had been part of an inseparable quintet of friends until his sudden, inexplicable, and total expulsion from the group. This trauma shaped his life for decades.
The loss, or even the distancing of old friends, once essential to my daily existence but no longer, has been the source of some of the deepest pain in my own life, and this quiet novel moved me in profound ways.
One of the most revered voices in literature today gives us a story of love, friendship, and heartbreak for the ages.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the remarkable story of a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and of a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the present.
A New York Times and Washington Post notable book, and one of the Financial Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Slate, Mother Jones, The Daily Beast,…
Rabbit, Run has astonishing sentence-by-sentence writing, with Updike’s brilliant insights expressed in the most consistently poetic, precise, and surprising phrasing and imagery. I frequently read individual sentences aloud to my wife. I listened to the audiobook when I was in the gym or the car and read the novel in bed and found myself listening to sections I’d already read because the audiobook made me slow down and pay attention to every word.
What’s striking is that none of the characters in Rabbit Run are particularly likable, or at least, no one behaves in a way that is remotely admirable, but the psychological acuity feels as compelling and true as the language. It simply commanded my full attention. I’d only read Rabbit is Rich and am thrilled to have returned to where the series started.
The first book in his award-winning 'Rabbit' series, John Updike's Rabbit, Run contains an afterword by the author in Penguin Modern Classics.
It's 1959 and Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, one time high school sports superstar, is going nowhere. At twenty-six he is trapped in a second-rate existence - stuck with a fragile, alcoholic wife, a house full of overflowing ashtrays and discarded glasses, a young son and a futile job. With no way to fix things, he resolves to flee from his family and his home in Pennsylvania, beginning a thousand-mile journey that he hopes will free him from his mediocre…
Adam Unrehearsed is a National Jewish Book Awards Finalist, a moving and hilarious coming-of-age comedy, that transports readers back to the fraught and exhilarating New York of the early 1970s in a story of friendship, betrayal, death, and acting. From the moment he’s mugged on the subway home from Yankee Stadium, things go wrong for irrepressible 12-year-old Adam Miller. He faces gangs, anti-Semitism, and practical jokes that go too far. He loses his old friends and makes new ones in surprising places. Hoping to survive until his bar mitzvah, Adam finds solace onstage, where he discovers the power of theater to bridge social divides. “Comical, lyrical, menacing, gritty, tender… compassionate and propulsive…and it rings true… a sure handed debut…” Colum McCann “Don Futterman has written a classic… hilarious… deeply moving…” Yossi Klein Halevi “Funny, wise, heartbreaking and heart-healing Futterman’s novel reaches across time… to bore into the universalities of youth.” Pamela Schoenewaldt - Historical Novel Society Adam Unrehearsed could not be more timely. Listen also to my comic autobiographical monologues on my performance podcast, Futterman’s One-Man Show.
