A midsummer day’s nightmare: shlepping all your worldly possessions to a new apartment. Everybody wants to settle in before the High Holidays and the school year starts, making June, July, and August the busiest season for moving companies. This also explains why the sections of Brooke Berman’s No Place Like Home: A Memoir in 39 ...

The incongruity of Tisha B’Av—a day of mourning during a period otherwise reserved by Americans for pool parties and cookouts—can make it difficult to attain a properly somber mood. If you need help getting down, or just desire a new perspective on the fast day’s ancient rituals and searing prayers, the brand new Koren Mesorat ...

If it can be considered a Jewish tradition to crack wise at the moment of bleakest tragedy, then the obscure comic book character Funnyman fits right in; so argue Thomas Andrae and Mel Gordon in Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman: The First Jewish Superhero (Feral House, July). Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster conceived of this improbable ...

Joyce Carol Oates could be called the Jacob Neusner of literary fiction: A writer so indefatigably productive that the word “prolific” doesn’t begin to do her justice, Oates has published in the neighborhood of a hundred books, including some 50 novels and 35 short story collections. (If Neusner’s name doesn’t ring a bell, he’s a ...

Ben Greenman seems plenty comfortable with his ethnicity—heck, he’s a Tablet contributing editor and put together a High Holiday project with Reboot—but his short stories tend to concentrate more on the precision of their formal and emotional effects than on, say, AIPAC, golems, or tefillin. His new collection, What He’s Poised to Do (Harper Perennial, ...

Whatever the facts of Israel’s political relationship with apartheid-era South Africa—recently chronicled, controversially, in Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship With Apartheid South Africa, and already reviewed and passionately debated here on Tablet—the Zionist state’s actions cannot be said to have reflected the individual perspectives of Jews, especially in South Africa, toward that ...

Reams and reams of articles and blog posts, yes, but no flotilla books quite yet. Don’t be surprised, though, if a future edition of Megan Stack’s Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (Doubleday, June) includes a few pages on the maritime fiasco and its fallout. Stack, a foreign correspondent ...

For the fortunate and fancy, Memorial Day weekend means the Hamptons. Those of us without beach houses can read about such folks in Dan Rattiner’s In the Hamptons Too: Further Encounters with Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires, and Celebrities (SUNY, May). The founder and editor of the local rag Dan’s Papers, Rattiner watched the area develop ...

More than ever before, universities seem to be churning out precocious novelists with impeccable credentials. The British wunderkind Adam Thirlwell demonstrates the breadth of his scholarly reading in The Escape (FSG, April), as Tablet’s Adam Kirsch has noted, with a wide range of literary allusions and a loving pastiche of past masters. In this case, ...

Celebrities with outsize personalities may make the people around them miserable, but, God bless ’em, they keep biographers in business. In Muriel Spark: The Biography (Norton, April), literary scholar and Evelyn Waugh biographer Martin Stannard describes the celebrated author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie as an eternal exile: “She belonged nowhere, was determined ...