The Mercy Journals is a new novel by Claudia Casper, author of The Reconstruction and The Continuation of Love by Other Means. In it, she creates a compelling post-climate change West Coast, where nations no longer exist. Her hero, Allen…
A new Canadian literary prize was announced recently – the Joan Betty Stuchner Oy Vey! Funniest Children’s Book Award. “With this award, we honor Joan Betty Stuchner’s life-affirming humor and encourage other children’s writers to laugh it up on the…
Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Aleichem gave us delightful fables about the shtetl, the overcrowded villages of Eastern Europe, with endearing characters that contended with abysmal poverty, deadly pogroms and false messiahs. However, life in the shtetl was not always…
It was a life-changing day for Sei Mang Khong Sai, a 35-year-old man from Sazal, India. Inside the mud and bamboo hut on stilts with him were community leaders, his family and guests. They chanted tribal prayers to the beat…
Michael Seidelman is donating 10% of novel profits this month to the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. (photo from Michael Seidelman) May is Cystic Fibrosis Awareness Month, so author Michael Seidelman will be donating 10% of the profits from this month’s book…
Dr. David Goldbloom (photo by Ksenija Ho) It was not that long ago that seeing a psychiatrist meant that people saw you as unstable or abnormal in some way. While societal views on many things have broadened, the stigma of…
As children, most of us at least once created a space of our own built of cushions, sheets, cardboard, branches, tables, almost anything – a space of our own that mimicked the house in which or near which it was…
Once a full-time organic farmer, David Asher offers workshops through his Black Sheep School of Cheesemaking. He has also recently published his own book, The Art of Natural Cheesemaking. (photo by Kelly Brown) Have you ever wanted your own cheese…
Think you know everything about Israel? Looking for an extraordinarily special book to give to someone who has been to Israel or is interested in the unusual aspects of the country that rarely, if ever, get press coverage? The answer…
Those of us who live and work in Israel as journalists and book reviewers for international publications often have to wait until an Israeli bestseller is translated from Hebrew into English. I, for one, am very excited when this occurs,…
