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.

The post Join Our Twitter Book Club on May 14 with Adam Wilson! appeared first on Jewcy.

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!

The post Join Our Twitter Book Club on April 2 with Jean Hanff Korelitz! appeared first on Jewcy.

Join us today at 1:30 p.m. EST for the first Twitter Book Club of 2013. Times of Israel writer Matti Friedman joins us and the Jewish Book Council to discuss his book, The Aleppo Codex, the never-before told mystery behind an ancient text’s alleged disappearance. We’ll be talking Jews, books, and secrets, and everyone’s invited.

Follow along on Twitter with the hashtag #JLit and be sure to follow @MattiFriedman and @JewishBook.

What to do before then:

• Cliffsnotes: Listen to Friedman discuss the book with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry.

• Context: Read Codex vs. Kindle, Matti Friedman’s Visiting Scribe blog post for the Jewish Book Council.

• Reviews: Peruse the New York Times Magazine’s review of The Aleppo Codex, which they call a “High Holy Whodunit.”

We’ll see you at 1:30!

The post Twitter Book Club: Matti Friedman Joins Us Today at 1:30 p.m. appeared first on Jewcy.

• Twitter Book Club alum Doreen Carvajal discovers Spain’s offer of citizenship to Sephardic Jews is not as easily attainable as it seemed. [NYT]

• Some ideas for what to do with your leftover potatoes post-Hanukkah. [Times of Israel]

• What happens when you go to www.ThirdReich.com? You reach the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. [NYT]

• “If anything happened to Mandy Patinkin on Homeland, it would be like the Yankees trading Derek Jeter to the Jets.” [Grantland]

• Kosher-keeping New York Knick Amar’e Stoudemire married his longtime girlfriend after manning the phones at the Dec. 12 Hurricane Sandy fundraiser. [NYP]

• Sacha Baron Cohen won a lifetime achievement award at the British Comedy Awards, and, naturally, Ali G accepted. [Splitsider]

The post Daily Jewce: Sacha Baron Cohen’s Lifetime Achievement, Amar’e Gets Hitched appeared first on Jewcy.

Novelist and 2010 Big Jewcy Jami Attenberg will join us and the Jewish Book Council for our third Twitter Book Club tomorrow at 1:30. She’ll be discussing her newest novel, The Middlesteins, and answering questions about Jews, food, and Jews and food.

Follow along on Twitter with the hashtag #JLit and be sure to follow @jamiattenberg and @JewishBook

Here are four easy ways to get ready:

• Check out Attenberg’s posts for the Jewish Book Council’s Visiting Scribes series.

• Read Adam Kirsch on Attenberg’s powerful storytelling in The Middlesteins over at Tablet.

• Take a look at Joe Winkler review of The Middlestein’s.

• Watch Vol. 1 Brooklyn’s entertaining video of Attenberg and Jeffrey Yoskowitz making pickles:

Previously: Like Jews and Books? You’ll Love Our New Twitter Book Club Partnership

The post Join Us Tomorrow For a Twitter Book Club With Novelist Jami Attenberg appeared first on Jewcy.

Over at Tablet, Tal Kra-Oz talks to Israeli novelist Shani Boianjiu about life after the publication of her first book, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid. Boianjiu joined us for a Twitter Book Club a few weeks ago, where she discussed being 25 and told us she definitely wasn’t the voice of a generation.

Kra-Oz chats with Boianjiu about her newfound literary acclaim, her childhood friends, and what’s going to happen when her book gets translated into Hebrew:

Sitting in a café in northern Israel, many of her friends having been called up for reserve duty in Gaza for operation Pillar of Defense—and facing the real possibility that she could be mobilized—Shani Boianjiu, 25, reflected on her childhood. “I really sympathize with people in the south,” she said. “We spent our daily life under the constant threat of attack, and only occasionally did that get any coverage. Now when half a rocket falls in the center of the country, that gets all the attention.” Though born in Jerusalem, Boianjiu grew up a two-hour drive from Tel Aviv, in Kfar Vradim, a small village in western Galilee. Just six miles from the border with Lebanon, it is one of the “frontline communities” that suffered Hezbollah rocket attacks throughout the 1990s. Kfar Vradim is part of Israel’s so-called periphery, in a country whose center is the narrow strip of land around Tel Aviv—40 miles long and 10 miles wide between Hadera and Gedera.

That feeling of remoteness pervades Boianjiu’s childhood memories as well as her novel, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid, which was published in English last September to great acclaim. Episodic in nature, the novel revolves around the lives of three young Israeli women—Lea, Avishag, and Yael—during their last years of high school and through their military service and civilian life after being discharged.

Shani Boianjiu Goes Home Again [Tablet] Previously: Culture Kvetch: Shani Boianjiu and the Problems of Youth

The post Hanging Out With Israeli Writer Shani Boianjiu appeared first on Jewcy.

Join us and the Jewish Book Council at 1:30 p.m. EST today for what should be a fascinating Twitter Book Club with Shani Boianjiu, the author of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid. In the novel, the 25-year-old Israeli writer weaves together the compelling tale of Lea, Avishag, and Yael, three friends from a small village near the Lebanese border as they begin their service in the Israel Defense Forces.

Use the hashtag #JLit to follow along with the discussion, and don’t hesitate to jump in with questions of your own—just make sure you include Boianjiu’s Twitter handle (@ShaniBoianjiu) and #JLit.

Before our chat, don’t miss:

• Jacob Silverman’s Culture Kvetch column about Boianjiu’s novel and the unique challenges of being a successful young writer.

• The Jewish Book Council’s review of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid.

• Boianjiu’s three blog posts for the Jewish Book Council’s Visiting Scribe series.

• Boianjiu’s New Yorker fiction, published this summer.

• The Jewish Book Council’s contemporary Israeli literature book list.

Previously: Like Jews and Books? You’ll Love Our New Twitter Book Club Partnership

The post Join Israeli Novelist Shani Boianjiu for Today’s Twitter Book Club appeared first on Jewcy.

We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with the Jewish Book Council on their great Twitter Book Club series. We’re huge fans of the JBC (we love their Prosen People blog), and are excited to team up with them.

Here’s the deal: Every month or so, we’ll have an exciting author on Twitter with us discussing his or her new book. You can ask questions directly (we will be!) or just follow along in real-time our brand new hashtag #JLit. Check out the transcripts of some our favorite Twitter Book Clubs past: Nathan Englander, David Bezmozgis, and Dara Horn.

Tune in Tuesday, October 23, when Doreen Carvajal will be answering questions about her new book, The Forgetting River. We’ll be tweeting up a storm from 1:30-2:10 p.m., and we hope you will be too! Until then, you can find the full archive and game day rules here.

Twitter Book Club Schedule:

October 23, 1:30PM-2:10PM: Doreen Carvajal, The Forgetting River

November 20, 1:30PM-2:10PM: Shani Boianjiu, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid

December 12, 1:30PM-2:10PM: Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins

(image via Shutterstock)

The post Like Jews and Books? You’ll Love Our New Twitter Book Club Partnership appeared first on Jewcy.