Ah, December! Season of rampant consumerism, holiday parties you don’t really want to attend, and endless, endless, ENDLESS end-of-year ‘best of’ lists. Luckily the fatigue hasn’t set in yet, so we’re raaaather excited by the New York Times‘ 100 Notable Books of 2014, just released today, which features a bunch of authors interviewed (or reviewed) by Jewcy.

1. Check out Esther Werdiger on Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast’s memoir of parental aging. It’s “an intense, humorous, and frequently painful exercise in catharsis”—well worth the read.

2. Anya Ulinich, author of the deliciously sad, sexy, literary graphic novel Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel, confessed to us that her book was “definitely semi-autobiographical,” and offered male readers some OKCupid profile tips. (Go easy on the Sylvia Plath, fellas.)

3. Boris Fishman, whose superb debut novel A Replacement Life was received to much acclaim, got real with Michael Orbach about Russian hirsuteness, pick-up lines, and the post-Soviet Brooklyn immigrant experience. There’s also a really good (/heartbreaking) anecdote about recycling and perfume, which pretty much encapsulates the tremendous pain of adolescence and immigration.

4. Gary Shteyngart confessed to us that he was “the most Republican kid on the planet”—literally a card-carrying member of the NRA at the age of 11.

5. Yelena Akhtiorskaya, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1992 at the age of 6, told Michael Orbach about the inspiration for her much-praised debut novel, Panic in a Suitcase: “A lot is based on my life… One is being totally fascinated by Brighton Beach—loving it and at the same time realizing that it’s a very absurd and sad place. The second is the dynamics of a claustrophobic, suffocating, chaotic family, which functions as a unified monstrous being.”

Which were your favorite books, Jewish or otherwise, of 2014?

The post Jewish Authors Land on the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2014 appeared first on Jewcy.

Inspired by this historic, poignant correspondence, comic artist Liana Finck—a Fulbright and Six Points fellow whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Forward and Tablet—wrote a graphic novel, also called A Bintel Brief. Slate‘s Dan Kois describes her style as “sharp, evocative,” and reminiscent of Ben Katchor and Roz Chast. I spoke with Finck talk about art, becoming a book person, and the making of A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York.

So, basic question: how’d you get to A Bintel Brief?

It started as a grant proposal for the Six Points Fellowship. I decided to become a serious comic book artist after college, and I gave myself one year. I had a Fulbright grant that was going to last less than a year, so I needed to finish a great comic. I was planning this amorphous, ambitious first novel and when the nine months were almost up I realized it wasn’t going to be finished and I needed another grant that would give me another year or two. I wanted something less ambitious and more limited, so I wouldn’t have to figure out how to locate and bare my soul. I was being calculating; jadedly I thought, “I can pretend to be the version of me that I’m not.” I can pretend to be this nice Jewish girl from the suburbs and write this small, nostalgic, non-intellectual Jewish story. If I could’ve sold my soul and done something that wasn’t me, that’s what I would have done with A Bintel Brief, but I really fell in love with it long before I finished the grant proposal—I fell in love the minute I started reading the letters. Once I read the letters I wasn’t jaded anymore.

What spoke to you from the letters?

They’re very simple and at the same time they’re seething with emotion. I’d always felt apart from the people I knew, especially people who were artists. I think I had a lot of feelings when I was a teenager and in my early twenties and I related a lot more to books and art than to people. I was expecting these letters to be things that I didn’t relate to, because they weren’t literature in my mind; they were in the human camp. But I did relate to them. Reading them made me realize that I wasn’t actually a high art person in an ivory tower; I was just a person who seeks human intensity.

Do you think that’s a part of growing up?

I think when you’re in your teens and early twenties—at least for me—you are a much more intense person than a full-fledged adult. I felt like I was miles away from other people with their small talk. I couldn’t find humanity in them. Just in Chekhov, etc.

I used to like books about people, but not people.

It’s so strange. I’m still like that, but I think it’s a delusion. We refuse to see humanity in people because we are so scared of them. They are layered and full of veils and contradictions. I used to think I liked it because only smart people could understand it, but I’ve realized that I like it because it’s abstract, and not trying so hard to make sense of all the feelings and mysteries. Abstraction does not lie.

It was The Catcher in the Rye’s anniversary last week. I re-read that book five times before I really got it—

I keep on seeing people reading it, I look at this guy and think, “He’s a brute of a Wall Street stock broker,” or “He’s a gangster wannabe,” and then I’ll see he’s got Catcher in the Rye in his back pocket. It changes everything. That’s the best feeling, seeing Catcher in the Rye in the back pocket of a pushy guy in a loud suit. I have to read it again. I read it when I was a young teenager and then an older teenager. I liked it but I don’t think it changed my life. I didn’t understand parts of it, and I wasn’t a book person yet.

When did you become a book person?

I became a poetry person at 13 and then a book person at 17. I stayed a poetry person until I was 21 and realized I wouldn’t be a poet because the poetry world seemed like a storm of ice crystals. I think I was always a story person, fairy tales and kid novels, but poetry was something totally different. When I was seventeen I realized that there were books that had the things I loved about poetry. I had a teacher who recommended great books to me when I was a junior in high school, and I started to read modernist novels like Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. Much earlier, my mom had given me [Vladimir] Nabokov and [Isak] Dinesen; I loved them the way I loved fairy tales as a kid, then I rediscovered them as puzzles as I got older.

Does your art mimic the puzzled thing that you liked in poetry?

I think working on art is a puzzle in of itself. I tried to be a poet and abstract painter when I was in college because that was the kind of art that really moved me, but I realized I liked abstract art and poetry because, looking at and reading it, I was doing a lot of work in my head that the artist or poet generously left unfinished. I’m not that generous in my work. I like to figure out the puzzles myself, and give the reader something more packaged and dogmatic.

What’s your favorite piece in the book?

I liked the first stories I started. I did more drafts of those, and was able to figure out slowly what the mood of the story was—time was my friend. I’m also fond of the blue parts [between the stories], I made those pages after I made the stories. The stories are adaptations—which is a limiting, tricky form to work in—you keep having to ask yourself, “Why does this letter need to be transmuted into comics?”—but also a safer art form. You aren’t telling your own story, so if the story turns out badly it’s not a reflection on your soul. Working on the narrative between stories gave me a very small, safe venue for telling my own semi-autobiographical story. I felt so free when I made it. It was also the least ambitious work of fiction I’ve ever tried to make, and working on it taught me that dry ambitiousness is NOT my friend.

One last question: Why did you draw Abraham Cahan with a heart-shaped face?

Because my mom used to draw heart-faced people on my lunch bags as a kid. She said I had a heart-shaped face. Cahan was a total brain-man. In creating A Bintel Brief, he tried to access his heart and he succeeded; he turned his brain into a heart. Sometimes I’m afraid his head looks like a turnip like the guy in Howl’s Moving Castle. Afraid is not the right word. The right word is delighted.

Image: © Liana Finck, reprinted from A Bintel Brief, published in 2014 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

The post Graphic Novelist Liana Finck on Yiddish Letters, Teen Angst, and Becoming a Book Person appeared first on Jewcy.

Boris Fishman, 35, is the author of A Replacement Life, a dark, hilarious new novel about a failed young journalist who begins forging Holocaust restitution claims for Russian Jews in Brooklyn, at the behest of his incorrigible grandfather. I talked to Fishman about writing, grandfathers, Russian hirsuteness, and the immigrant experience.

So when I first saw that you were 35, I became quite jealous of your success. Then I looked at your author photo and realized you look like you’re 50 and like you might have killed someone in the Gulag.

Maybe you should be worried. Since the novel is about a crime and the first question anyone asks of a debut novelist is how autobiographical this is, I guess there’s a possibility that I have those tendencies. But I don’t. My temperament is the diametrical opposite… People assume you’re one kind of person but I’m a total teddy bear. Everyone’s kind of thrown by that.

You do seem awfully nice. I was expecting a Russian cliché.

I’m really nothing like the typical Russian person except for several key departments.

What are those key departments? Are you hirsute?

I am hirsute, absolutely, but nothing compared with my father. But really I’m talking about a certain quickness to intimacy. There’s a really wonderful essay in the New York Times by Alina Simone about the meaning of “How are you?” in American versus Russian culture. American culture is far more civil than Russian, if we are going to generalize and be reductive, but Russian culture tends to go soulful and deep much more quickly than American culture. I really don’t want to have small talk–I want to get down and deep very quickly. I don’t mean you, the person I’m speaking with right now, but hell, you too.

And the next thing is a real devotion to Russian literature and Russian culture. For all those horrible things that happened in the Soviet Union—there were many–the one thing that was remarkable was that there was state-mandated intellectualism, so to speak, in the sense that cultural production wasn’t dictated by the market, but the government. There was no low-brow literature published, and by the time you graduated high school, you were deeply familiar with all the Russian classics. In a society like that, there was obviously a big problem in the individual-freedom department, but at the same time you had a lot of people with a tremendous amount of respect for literature, a cultural literacy that was really impressive. I have a lot of respect for that heritage.

You got the good and none of the bad, except for the hirsuteness?

The hirsuteness gets rough especially when it’s warm. Some days, it really isn’t the most awesome cultural patrimony.

I’m speaking to an author about hairiness. I don’t know when exactly my life went wrong.

I do appreciate the novel direction this is going. There are only so many times I can talk about where I got the idea for the novel. [Laughs.]

That’s good–I really don’t care about that. I’m really more interested in your hair.

Well, I’ve got none on my head: an odd bargain. I took after my father. Meanwhile, my maternal grandfather, who is 87–may he live till 120, as we say–has a full head of hair and not a wisp on his chest. His hair is like goose down. He lives in Midwood. Sometimes I go down there just to eat his home-attendant’s cooking and rustle his hair.

We should trade grandfathers.

I should rent him out. Rent a grandfather.

He’d make a great pick-up line.

The thing about my grandfather is if I brought him as a wing-man, he’d collect more women than I would. He’s a really interesting storyteller.

When the story broke about the group of Russian Jews defrauding Holocaust restitution claims, did you see a novel in that?

The novel was formed by then. I started writing in November 2009 and this was exposed in November 2010. I had just gotten to a seven-month writing residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, which is very remote from all things Jewish and all things New York. I was stunned to see this in the Times, but I didn’t really feel like my thunder was stolen. It didn’t feel like it was a story that would own the mainstream news for weeks and weeks. It was more that it was a bizarre and really depressing vindication of what I imagined.

What happened afterward was quite interesting. I wrote an article in Tablet Magazine saying that, legally, there’s no question these people are culpable and they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But morally, let’s not dismiss them as pure evil. Let’s instead try to understand why they did something like this… The people who did this were primarily ex-Soviet Jews. For me, they’re trauma victims, and trauma victims inflict a lot of damage. But I feel that their culpability is mitigated by the trauma they underwent. I don’t know if they can plead insanity, but actually something close. They spent decades in a system whose perversity and abusiveness and discrimination against Jews is difficult to convey. That doesn’t make what they did okay–but I think it obligates us to be nuanced in our moral judgment of them. Certainly, you can’t write fiction about them without that capacity.

So what was the kernel that started the novel?

For me the genesis of the novel had to do with the fact that Holocaust survivors behind the Iron Curtain were not able to apply for restitution because it was felt that their governments would poach the money—a reasonable thing to have been concerned about. My grandmother, a survivor, did not become eligible to apply until we got here from the USSR in 1988. When she got set to submit her paperwork in the 1990s, it was given to me even though I was just a teenager because I had the best English in the family.

Two things stood out to me, one leading to the next. The first was that virtually no documentation was requested, for obvious reasons. You weren’t given a confirmation voucher when you went to the Minsk ghetto. So it kind of came down to how good a story you could tell; a matter of history became a matter of storytelling. I didn’t need to make it up for my grandmother since she went through it, but that idea was intriguing.

And the second thought I had was: It’s just a matter of time before someone has a field day with these applications. And that someone, I knew, might very well come from the ex-Soviet community. If you lived in that place, you couldn’t get certain basic things without going around the law. Some people remained honorable and did without; some people lucked out and knew the right people; others just wanted a little more for their families. I’m not talking about Rolls-Royces and gold watches. I’m talking about another pair of shoes or a banana. Tangerines were a once-a-year luxury. Sometimes, you could not get basic things without resorting to light crime.

Speaking of Russian Jewish writers, Gary Shtenygart just came out with his memoir. Was your arrival in America as painful as his?

I would guess that it was, but every pain is its own. That’s why people fail to learn from their mistakes, not because they’re stupid but because every mistake has its own character profile.

It’s brutal at such an impressionable age to switch from one place to another that’s so different. In my case, I became the adult of the family. I learned English the fastest and became my family’s ambassador to a world that had things going on that we had never dreamed about: phone bills, credit cards, medical insurance, car insurance… Suddenly I was responsible for all this being handled properly, for the family coming to no disadvantage or harm. I used to be so terrified of making a mistake that when I collected cans to bring to the supermarket for the five-cent deposit, not only did I wash them out with water, I sprayed them with my mother’s Parisian perfume so the supermarket would have no way to say no.

Related: Gary Shteyngart On Surviving Solomon Schechter, Soviet Pain, And Botched Circumcisions

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Imagine this: you’re at Chipotle, chowing down on your liberal, guilt-free, ethically-sourced burrito, when—horror of horrors—you realize you have nothing to read. Your smartphone’s out of juice, you left your kindle at home, and you don’t have a paperback in your back pocket (because, hello, 2014, death of the novel, etc). What do you do? Eat without distraction for ten blissful, quiet minutes? GOD FORBID. This is America, not France.

Such a fate befell Jonathan Safran Foer recently, and he wanted to “die with frustration.” That is a real quote, you guys. But from deprivation comes innovation! Vanity Fair breaks the news that as of today, you’ll be able to read flash fiction and mini-essays by Foer, Malcolm Gladwell, Toni Morrison, George Saunders, and Michael Lewis on Chipotle’s bags and cups.

What happened was this: frustrated Foer emailed Steve Ells, Chipotle’s CEO, and suggested putting words on their food packaging. He told VF, “I said, ‘I bet a shitload of people go into your restaurants every day, and I bet some of them have very similar experiences, and even if they didn’t have that negative experience, they could have a positive experience if they had access to some kind of interesting text… So I said, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool to just put some interesting stuff on it? Get really high-quality writers of different kinds, creating texts of different kinds that you just give to your customers as a service.'”

The union between Chipotle and Foer is a curious one. In 2009, Foer penned Eating Animals, a searing critique of America’s meat industry, and consequently became a vegetarian. Chipotle serves meat, albeit “naturally-raised” meat, procured from farms and slaughterhouses that allow their animals to roam free (or free-ish). But dead animals are still dead animals, and when asked how he felt about working with a company that serves meat to a lot of people, Foer replied: “I wouldn’t have done it if it was for another company like a McDonald’s, but what interested me is 800,000 Americans of extremely diverse backgrounds having access to good writing. A lot of those people don’t have access to libraries, or bookstores. Something felt very democratic and good about this.”

You can read Foer’s contribution, ‘Two-Minute Personality Test,’ here. He posits some interesting questions, like “Are you in any way angry at your phone?” and “Is it any way cruel to give a dog a name?”

The post New Writing From Jonathan Safran Foer… On Chipotle Cups appeared first on Jewcy.

Here’s an excerpt taken from the title story—it’s about weed and Texas and a hairdresser named Kathleen:

“The haircut would be easier to get than the weed, but he wanted the weed first so he could be stoned during the haircut. For the weed I had to approach a Texan. The Texans hated us, but some hated us less than others. Luckily, a kind woman bummed a cigarette off me, called me “Sweetheart,” and agreed to help with both my tasks. Her name was Kathleen, and she was the on-set hairdresser.

Kathleen didn’t give a shit about the higher-ups like Tipplehorn. Just did her thing in the hair trailer, smoking bats and talking on speakerphone to her teenage daughter who was spending the summer at an arts camp ­outside Denton. When they said good-bye, Kathleen waved her hand as if her daughter could see her from the other end of the line. She said, “Girl,” and her daughter said, “Bye now,” and Kathleen looked in the mirror and saw me behind her, squint-eyed in the barber’s chair, finally sun-shaded, ­almost asleep.”

Participating is a piece of cake: just log onto Twitter when the chat begins at 1:30pm, follow Jewcy and the Jewish Book Council, and tweet your questions for Wilson (@BubblesDepot) with the hashtag #JLit.

Read more about Twitter book club here.

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We’re thrilled to announce that our Twitter book club collaboration with the Jewish Book Council is back! We’ll be chatting (well, tweeting) with Jean Hanff Korelitz, author of You Should Have Known, on April 2 at 1:30pm Eastern Time.

Her latest novel is a juicy, unputdownable, emotional, psychological literary thriller, you guys—think Gone Girl meets Atmospheric Disturbances. Here’s the synopsis:

Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things: she lives in the very New York apartment in which she was raised, and sends Henry to the school she herself once attended.

Dismayed by the ways in which women delude themselves, Grace is also the author of a book, You Should Have Known, in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them at the very beginning of the relationship. But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations.

Participating is a piece of cake: just log onto Twitter when the chat begins, follow Jewcy and the Jewish Book Council, and tweet your questions for Korelitz with the hashtag #JLit.

Read more about the Twitter book club here, and enter the draw to win  a copy here!

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