Have you wondered about what your favorite cultural figures carry in their bags, that most intimate of spaces? Abbi Jacobson (of Broad City fame) did. And now, she’s sharing her best guesses with you in her (third) illustrated work, Carry This Book.

Ranging from Willy Wonka, to Sigmund Freud, to Bernie Madoff, to, well, God, Jacobson shows us what she imagines they have on them from day to day (and provides her own lightly judgmental commentary), and she’s pretty convincing. Of course Nora Ephron would carry a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils (and deep cut there, Abbi).

But the best part about the book isn’t even its jokes about icons, living, dead, or fictional. Carry This Book replicates that feeling of watching Jacobson’s TV show that you already know her and are best friends and hang out with her and Ilana Glazer (whose purse is also in here, by the way) as a Jewish pal trio and you simultaneously feel totally at ease and also mutually indulge in all your worst neuroses.

For example, some of the women Jacobson admires most seem to be interested in watching Broad City (and Michelle Obama has a Marc Maron interview with Glazer and Jacobson on her list of podcasts). But despite this idea being  her invention, Jacobson acts surprised and elated every time she encounters a shout-out she has essentially left for herself (“WHAT!?!” she exclaims when she sees a Broad City App on Beyoncé’s phone).

Throughout the book, also Jacobson peppers in handbag-related advice both literal and figurative, including lamenting that her “essentials” list is far too long, and that we all carry anger, love, regrets, hopes, etc. And even in short, funny captions, she expresses nuanced opinions.

“In all seriousness, Barbie should rep all shapes, colors + sizes of women around the world,” She scrawls next to the doll’s imagined driver’s license. But then she includes a NASA astronaut ID card, and adds, “…Excited she has + is evolving.”

Considering her two-page spread gently ribbing self-help and guide books (“Field Notes!” “Pocket Dictionary!” “How To: Live Life The Best!”), Jacobson has presented one in the gentlest way possible. Even Albert Einstein must have carried around emergency chocolate or a pair of socks “In case someone gave him shit” for going without. You can schlep around your own insecurities, as long as you also take what you need.

Ultimately, in perhaps the best advice in the entire book, remember Jacobson’s carrying “Must List”:

• A Pen
• Some sort of notebook
• Headphones
• Lip gloss
• Metrocard
• AN OPEN MIND

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Shelly Oria’s debut short story collection, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, is simultaneously delicate and shattering. The book derives its title from a story of the same name, in which an Israeli expat from in New York obsessively tallies the merits of the two cities that she has called home. “It’s an ongoing competition,” she says, “But I forget to keep track, so I have to keep counting all over again.”

Many stories in Oria’s collection are rooted in two cities on opposite sides of the globe, their central characters Israelis who have made their way to the United States. But New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 is more textured than a simple exploration of migration and cultural difference. Quietly and without ceremony, Oria’s narratives veer into worlds that are unidentifiable and bizarre. In ‘The Beginning of a Plan,’ a young woman flees Israel to America to escape criminal prosecution, and discovers that she can quite literally freeze time. In ‘Victor, Changed Man,’ a couple reunites and promptly separates against the backdrop of an anonymous city that has been overtaken by a dense, unyielding fog. Often, the book’s fantastical narratives border on the grotesque. Oria writes of a North American town that traffics in human organs and blood, of another dominated by a band of vengeful, violent women. “We hold our men by their balls,” the nameless protagonist says. “And we squeeze.”

Even in the stories situated in identifiable locations, there is something disarming about the characters, who speak and think in jarring declaratives. “I always look them in the eye throughout, so as not to miss my moment,” says the protagonist of ‘This Way I Don’t Have to Be,’ explaining her addiction to sleeping with married men. “In that moment, their lives turn to air.” But beneath the cryptic authority of statements like these lies confusion and chaos. The lives of Oria’s characters are steeped in loneliness, unrequited love, and confounding lust. They subsist in fluid, often queer, sexual relationships that prove agonizing. Booney, the central character of a story called ‘The Thing About Sophia,’ develops feelings for her female roommate, and is invited into her bed, but not into her heart. In the titular ‘New York 1, Tel Aviv 0,’ an Israeli immigrant moves in with a former IDF soldier and falls desperately for his girlfriend, a woman who cannot be tamed.

Oria author was born in Los Angeles, but raised in Israel, and she taught herself to write fiction in English when she was an adult. If she is at any disadvantage when it comes to proficiency in the language, it does not show. Her sentences are piercing, her tone cool and assured. She is admirably bold in her storytelling, weaving her short narratives with ribbons of the strange and the surreal.

Every now and then, however, Oria overreaches in her attempts at originality. ‘Fully Zipped,’ which chronicles a series of exchanges between a customer and a salesperson in the fitting room of a clothing store, relies more on concept than on characters, and fizzles away without leaving much of an impression. ‘Documentation’ explores the unravelling of a relationship through a catalogue of kisses—a narrative technique that feels gimmicky and stale.

Some of the most striking stories in New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 are, in fact, the ones rendered in simple linear narratives. ‘The Disneyland of Albany,’ the strongest story in the collection and the most overtly political, follows an Israeli artist named Avner, who leaves his young daughter Maya in Tel Aviv when he moves to New York to further his art career. During one of Maya’s visits to the States, Avner travels to Albany to meet a wealthy Jewish patron, who subtly attempts to bully Avner into infusing his work with Zionist symbolism. At one point, Maya becomes agitated when she learns that a community was displaced so Nelson Rockefeller could build Albany’s Empire State Plaza. “Did they use tanks?” she asks, a reference to the Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes.

If the circumstances of Oria’s more ethereal narratives are unnerving and strange, so is this story of a little girl who carries the trauma of her country’s wars. In New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, devastating realities collide with haunting landscapes of the surreal, until it cannot be said where one ends and the other begins.

Related: New Short Story Collection Explores Tel Aviv’s Dark Side

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Death, then deluge: I couldn’t stop thinking about this while reading cartoonist Roz Chast‘s new memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? An intense, humorous, and frequently painful exercise in catharsis, it closely documents the decline and eventual deaths of Chast’s elderly parents—and it’s not pretty. As any dutiful daughter knows, you are definitely not allowed to write about your parents until they are no longer of this world. And if you have siblings, probably not even then. Chast, however, is an only child, and she here she presents a loving but unsparing examination of her parents, and herself.

The story is told through a combination of comics, handwritten pages, photos, and sketches. Chast’s style is harried, and drawings rarely seem drafted, perfectly channeling both the anxiety of living the events described, and the urgency of wanting to record all of it. The photos show up unexpectedly, and to great effect. Pages describing her hoarding parents’ apartment are followed by stark images of rooms filled with piles of browning and greying stuff, the decrepitude highlighted by the flash-photograph.

Visually, comics can get you to a place that feels, somehow, closer to the truth. People who draw their experiences are attempting to document everything as precisely as possible: this is what was said; this is what everyone was wearing; this is what the weather was like on that day. Chast is deeply observant, and a natural storyteller, and the flood of emotion and memory has a remarkable flow. Several comics (and some truly amazing photos of a young, grumpy, cat-eye bespectacled Chast), serve as flashbacks to her childhood, and these stories aren’t merely anecdotal. With the author now caring for her parents, every incident mentioned takes on a new layer of meaning.

Chast has made her name writing jokes on the themes of worry and disappointment, so it’s no surprise that even the funny parts are quite dark. Bizarre Alzheimer’s moments make for amusing stories, as do strange and horrifying incidents at the aged care facility her parents move to. When her mother insists that her (long-deceased) mother-in-law is trying to poison her, or another resident falls off her chair during mealtime, nobody is dismayed. Laughing is coping, because what else can you do? It’s an informative insight into the origin of Chast’s style, and her general philosophy.

Examined more than anything is the author’s relationship with her mother, a stubborn and often unfriendly woman whose New York home ran on fear–of the outside world, money, death, and disease. Mrs. Chast is equally stubborn in dying; she exists suspended between life and death for an extended period of time, and here, more than anywhere else, the trauma of Chast’s unhappy childhood revisits her. She seeks closure and answers, but rarely looks to her mother for comfort; alas, she has never been its source. The painful resolve in wanting to be a better mother than her own is evident here. She worked hard to leave and change, but here she is, back where it all started. These are the things you cannot escape, and this is what they look like.

Waiting with her newly-deceased mother, Chast writes “I didn’t know what do, so I drew her.” A sketch follows. Pages of similar sketches follow; simple pen drawings of her mother’s comatose, slack-jawed face, drawn in the days leading up to her passing. These are not comics. They are dated drawings documenting precisely what the author was looking at: a dying, elderly woman. Death, as usual, demands to be looked at in the eye. Chast tells us that her parents’ “cremains” live in her closet. They are together, they are quiet, and finally, she can contain them. So: death, then deluge, but then maybe peace.

Esther C. Werdiger writes, makes comics, illustrates, podcasts, and lives in New York. You can read her “League of Ordinary Ladies” series here.

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“My mom is the only one who gets excited if I tell her I got my bangs trimmed or if I bought a new kind of frozen food at Trader Joe’s,” Rachel Ament jokes, via email. That’s the thing about moms: they love us when we’re grocery shopping or even when we’re editing an essay anthology about them.

Ament, 30, is the editor of the new essay anthology Jewish Daughter Diaries: True Stories of Being Loved Too Much By Our Moms, which features essays from Jewish women of all ages about their beloved mothers and grandmothers, including—but not limited to—actress Mayim Bialik of The Big Bang Theory; Jena Friedman, producer of The Daily Show; Iliza Shlesinger, winner of NBC’s Last Comic Standing, and Anna Breslaw, Cosmopolitan‘s Sex and Relationships editor.

Ament—whose essay “Seth Cohen is the One For You,” about an evening at the infamous Matzoh Ball at her mother’s behest, appears in the anthology—began working on Jewish Daughter Diaries in 2012 in the hours away from her day job as a Social Media Writer for Capital One. “The hours varied. Maybe an hour or so a night. It just depended on what stage I was at in the process,” she said. “During the final editing process this [past] summer, I probably spent about three or more hours a day on it.”

But what makes someone decide to assemble a collection of essays about Jewish moms? Well, said Ament, the key was realizing how similar the experiences of Jewish daughters were: “Whenever my Jewish friends tell me stories about their moms, the stories are always so funny and endearing and relatable. I see my mom in their moms. I thought that there was this great universality about Jewish moms that Jewish women could embrace and bond over, instead of ignore.” My own feelings were the same when reading Jewish Daughter Diaries—whether I was on the subway or at the gym, I was cupping my hands over my eyes and laughing, thanking the universe, thinking, “It’s not just me!”

To wit: in the introduction Ament recounts an all-too-familiar phone call with her mother, who doesn’t identify the reason she’s calling, but instead twists winds her way through the conversation with a variety of cockamamie suggestions (“Did you tell Blossom you used to look just like her when you were a kid?”), yells to her father in the another room (“Mark, get on the phone!”) and asks absurd questions about the future (“How do you think you will respond to my death? A loud hysterical reaction or a quiet detachment?”), never getting to the actual point of the call.

I’ve had similar phone conversations with my own mother, who will inevitably call while I’m buried to my ears in work:

“Do you have time to talk?”

“No, I’m sorry, I’m really busy. Can I please call you later?”

“So how are you, how is your day?”

“What can I do for you, ma?”

“Daddy wants to know if you heard from that editor. Oh! And I went to Bloomingdale’s with Aunt Addie today and we found this wild plum lipstick at Clinique we thought you would love so we got it for you. We had lunch at that stir fry place again. What’s it called? Stir Crazy? You know the food there isn’t what it used to be. Maybe they need new woks. You know, they had the best deal on woks at Ikea the other day. Do you want me to get you one? I’ll send it to you in the mail with that bread knife you left here…”

And so on.

But as the reader soon learns, the point is that a Jewish mom doesn’t need a reason to call. She’s your mother, and whether you like it or not, she’s allowed to call you as many times per day as she likes and say absolutely anything or, as it so happens, nothing at all. To her, that’s what love looks like.

Ament draws on this idea throughout the anthology to tie the essays together. In “You Should Be Playing Tennis,” Jena Friedman calls her mother for a chocolate chip cookie recipe—and receives a diatribe about the life mistakes she’s making, interspersed with baking instructions (“Off hand, I don’t know the exact proportions but I bet you can find it online… I’ve actually become quite an internet junkie now that I have so much alone time since neither you nor your sister ever come home to visit me.”) Gaby Dunn’s “Home for the Apocalypse,” recounts the numerous mom-safety emails she’s received over the years (“Did you know that dialing *677 tells you if the unmarked police car trying to pull you over is actually a murderer? You didn’t? That’s because none of these myths are true, but all of these tips have been heralded as life-saving advice by my mother.”) The message is that Jewish moms schmear on the guilt and forward the emails and make directionless phone calls because they miss you and they want you to be safe.

“No matter how much our cultural and political landscape shifts,” said Ament, “mothers still want the same thing for their kids. They will still want them to be happy and find love and success. The difference between Jewish and helicopter moms is in the associations. We think of a helicopter mom as someone who is constantly over our shoulder, buzzing around us, policing and controlling us. There is more warmth and love attached to our idea of a Jewish mom. A Jewish mom is softer. She just wants to feed us.”

The Yiddishe Mameh, the Jewish Daughter Diaries reveals, is not easily tamed, and her daughter is all the better for it.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

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There is an immutable law of Internet journalism that no article you write will be as appreciated as a goofy Tumblr created in a moment of idleness. (I’m sure Jeff Jarvis has a name for this.) That has been the case for me since earlier this year, when I started a Tumblr to catalogue all of the blurbs of author Gary Shteyngart, whose “promiscuous praise”—among today’s writers, he might be the most prolific blurber—had become something of a modern legend. Other writers might give me a small compliment for some review I’ve written, but upon hearing that I’m the proprietor of “The Collected Blurbs of Gary Shteyngart” and that I’ve made it a mission to catalog all of the outbursts of praise from an inveterate praise artist—well, that’s when my acquaintances nod their heads before politely excusing themselves.

Let us now praise the praiser. Over the years, Shteyngart has been interviewed about his blurbing compulsion, and his answers reflect his monkish devotion to the craft. Recently he talked to A.J. Jacobs, another compulsive blurber, about the habit for the New York Times, explaining how he decides to blurb a book: “I look for the following: Two covers, one spine, at least 40 pages, ISBN number, title, author’s name. Once those conditions are satisfied, I blurb. And I blurb hard.”

Indeed! And so I will testify, to you, reader, who accidentally clicked on this column. For I’ve gone deep into the Amazonian forests and gathered, like so many plump berries, 61 Shteyngart blurbs, though some of those were submitted by readers and others are evanescent things, unable to be pinned to a book cover, such as one about A.J. Jacobs’ Times article. There are still rarer, more delicate objects in my collection—Faberge blurbs—including a blurb about a tweet: “Simon montefiore has written a classic tweet that will endure for hours.” Aye, perhaps, but the record of that praise will now live on forever (or until Tumblr runs through its venture capital).

And however vain it might be, the most precious blurb under my stewardship is one that Shteyngart, who reportedly only writes fiction to support his menagerie of dachshunds (if he had his druthers, I’m told, he would do nothing but blurb, blurbing deep into the night), wrote upon my request. It is a blurb for the blurber, a blurber’s blurb, and I’ve positioned it, as one would a Picasso in the foyer, at the top of the site. It reads in full: “Gary Shteyngart’s blurbs are touching, funny and true. This is a blurber to watch.”

What makes a Gary Shteyngart blurb? First, it is in English. (This is no small matter, for Gary, nee Igor, was born in the Soviet Union and counts Russian as his mother tongue.) Second, it has words, usually complimentary words, many of them adjectives. There are periods and, sometimes, a wittily placed exclamation mark. Occasionally he allows a metaphor, catlike, to slink in. And surrounding all this: two quotation marks, staring fondly at each other across the expanse of neon prose.

Some people have told me that blurbs are meaningless, that they have long been despised as a low and disingenuous part of the book marketing machine. They are favors traded between writers; they are small kindnesses reluctantly given; they are a trick that agents, when they are resting their voices from screaming at their assistants, force their writers to perform. Others say that no one pays attention to blurbs or that, if they do, they are fools, seduced by puffery that probably originated in an infomercial testimonial for a food dehydrator.

But I think that blurbs are more than that—or at least that Gary Shteyngart’s, numinous and numerous, are. Sure, I have read and typed this word (“blurb”; bluuuuurb) enough times so that it no longer appears like language to me. Yes, I have spent so much time scouring book catalogs and googling “Gary Shteyngart blurb” (and, in more desperate moments, “Gary Shteyngart blurbs”) that I have lost all sight of where I came from, so that I now stand on some distant precipice, surrounded by a roiling sea of Tumblr tags, under a vaulted sky of reblogs and heart icons that, if only I stretched far enough, I think I could somehow click.

Yet on the way towards this place, I have seen things. I have seen the difference between “a brilliant, funny, humane writer” (Sayed Kashua) and a “highly entertaining debut novel” (George Hagen’s The Laments). More importantly, I believe—though we have only exchanged a few (masterful! irreverent! genre-bending!) tweets—that I have seen into the heart of Gary Shteyngart himself. Like Hunter S. Thompson, who retyped The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms to know what it was like to write a great novel, I have done the same with The Collected Blurbs of Gary Shteyngart. Fine, I have only cut and pasted them into Tumblr between games of Starcraft II, but in this age of brevity, that must count for something near the same.

And when Gary Shteyngart decides to hang up that well-thumbed thesaurus, I will be there, asking him, Why? Were we not good enough? Do we, do they, those undersung MFA graduates, no longer deserve your praise? And I am sure that he will turn to me and—with great delicacy and prefaced by several improvised flattering remarks—ask why I have violated the court order that is surely in my future.

(Art by Margarita Korol)

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