Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel

Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel

Author: Anya Ulinich

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2014-07-29

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0698170695

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*A New York Times Notable Book* “Funny, painful, outrageous . . . Anya Ulinich is the David Sedaris of Russian-American cartoonists.” —Gary Shteyngart Anya Ulinich turns her sharp eye toward the strange, often unmooring world of “grown-up” dating in this darkly comic graphic novel. After her fifteen-year marriage ends, Lena Finkle gets an eye-opening education in love, sex, and loss when she embarks on a string of online dates, all while raising her two teenage daughters. The Vampire of Bensonhurst, the Orphan, Disaster Man, and the Diamond Psychiatrist are just a few of the unforgettable characters she meets along the way. Evoking Louis C. K.’s humor and Amy Winehouse’s longing and anguish, and paying homage to Malamud and Chekhov, Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel is a funny and moving story, beautifully told.


Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel

Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel

Author: Anya Ulinich

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2014-07-29

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0143125249

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*A New York Times Notable Book* “Funny, painful, outrageous . . . Anya Ulinich is the David Sedaris of Russian-American cartoonists.” —Gary Shteyngart Anya Ulinich turns her sharp eye toward the strange, often unmooring world of “grown-up” dating in this darkly comic graphic novel. After her fifteen-year marriage ends, Lena Finkle gets an eye-opening education in love, sex, and loss when she embarks on a string of online dates, all while raising her two teenage daughters. The Vampire of Bensonhurst, the Orphan, Disaster Man, and the Diamond Psychiatrist are just a few of the unforgettable characters she meets along the way. Evoking Louis C. K.’s humor and Amy Winehouse’s longing and anguish, and paying homage to Malamud and Chekhov, Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel is a funny and moving story, beautifully told.


Petropolis

Petropolis

Author: Anya Ulinich

Publisher: Viking Adult

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13:

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Sasha Goldberg is the ultimate outsider: she's a chubby, biracial Jewish girl from the Siberian town of Asbestos 2. Her father takes off for the United States, and leaves Sasha to navigate adolescence in a bleak apartment bloc with her overbearing mother. Sasha falls in love with an art school drop-out who lives inside a concrete pipe in the town dump. Following her heart gets her into trouble at home, so she flees Russia as a mail-order bride and lands in suburban Arizona. Sasha manages to escape her Red Lobster-loving fianc? and embarks on a misadventure-filled journey across America in search of her father. Anya Ulinich has crafted an unforgettable story of familial fault lines, cross-cultural confusion, and the beguiling allure of new beginnings. Petropolis is a funny and poignant debut marking the arrival of a major new voice in fiction.


The Magic Barrel

The Magic Barrel

Author: Bernard Malamud

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2003-07-07

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 146680551X

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Winner of the National Book Award: “Every one of [the stories] is a small, highly individualized work of art.” —The Chicago Tribune With an introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Namesake Bernard Malamud’s first book of short stories, The Magic Barrel, has been recognized as a classic from the time it was published in 1959. The stories are set in New York and in Italy, where Malamud’s alter ego, the struggling New York Jewish Painter Arthur Fidelman, roams amid the ruins of old Europe in search of his artistic patrimony. The stories tell of egg candlers and shoemakers, matchmakers, and rabbis, in a voice that blends vigorous urban realism, Yiddish idiom, and literary inventiveness. A high point in the history of the modern American short story, The Magic Barrel is a fiction collection which, at its heart, is about the immigrant experience. Few books of any kind have managed to depict struggle and frustration and heartbreak with such delight, or such artistry. “Malamud possesses a gift for characterization that is often breathtaking. . . .[His] fiction bubbles with life.” —New York Times “[Malamud] has been called the Jewish Hawthorne, but he might just as well be thought a Jewish Chopin, a prose composer of preludes and noctures.” —Partisan Review


Liar & Spy

Liar & Spy

Author: Rebecca Stead

Publisher: Wendy Lamb Books

Published: 2012-08-07

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0375899537

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The instant New York Times bestseller from the author of the Newbery Medal winner When You Reach Me: a story about spies, games, and friendship. The first day Georges (the S is silent) moves into a new Brooklyn apartment, he sees a sign taped to a door in the basement: SPY CLUB MEETING—TODAY! That’s how he meets his twelve-year-old neigh­bor Safer. He and Georges quickly become allies—and fellow spies. Their assignment? Tracking the mysterious Mr. X, who lives in the apartment upstairs. But as Safer’s requests become more and more demanding, Georges starts to wonder: how far is too far to go for your only friend? “Will touch the hearts of kids and adults alike.” —NPR Winner of the Guardian Prize for Children’s Fiction Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and more!


The Midnight Zoo

The Midnight Zoo

Author: Sonya Hartnett

Publisher: Candlewick Press

Published: 2011-09-13

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 0763656321

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Master storyteller Sonya Hartnett crafts a magical and moving fable about war and redemption . . . and what it means to be free. When the Germans attack their Romany encampment during World War II, Andrej and his younger brother, Tomas, flee through a ravaged countryside under cover of darkness, guarding a secret bundle. Their journey leads to a bombed-out town, where the boys discover a hidden wonder: a zoo filled with creatures in need of hope. Like Andrej and Tomas, the animals--wolf and eagle, monkey and bear, lioness and seal, kangaroo and llama-- have stories to share and a mission to reclaim their lives.


Soviet Daughter

Soviet Daughter

Author: Julia Alekseyeva

Publisher: Comix Journalism

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781621069690

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This is the story of Julia Alekseyeva and her great-grandmother Lola. Born in 1910 to a poor, Jewish family outside of Kiev, Lola lived through the Bolshevik revolution, a horrifying civil war, Stalinist purges, and the Holocaust. She taught herself to read, and supported her extended family working as a secretary for the notorious NKVD (which became the KGB) and later as a lieutenant for the Red Army. Interwoven with Lola's history we find Julia's own struggles of coming of age in an immigrant family in Chicago, and her political awakening in the midst of the radical politics of the turn of the millennium.


"How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?"

Author: Tahneer Oksman

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2016-02-16

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 0231540787

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American comics reflect the distinct sensibilities and experiences of the Jewish American men who played an outsized role in creating them, but what about the contributions of Jewish women? Focusing on the visionary work of seven contemporary female Jewish cartoonists, Tahneer Oksman draws a remarkable connection between innovations in modes of graphic storytelling and the unstable, contradictory, and ambiguous figurations of the Jewish self in the postmodern era. Oksman isolates the dynamic Jewishness that connects each frame in the autobiographical comics of Aline Kominsky Crumb, Vanessa Davis, Miss Lasko-Gross, Lauren Weinstein, Sarah Glidden, Miriam Libicki, and Liana Finck. Rooted in a conception of identity based as much on rebellion as identification and belonging, these artists' representations of Jewishness take shape in the spaces between how we see ourselves and how others see us. They experiment with different representations and affiliations without forgetting that identity ties the self to others. Stemming from Kominsky Crumb's iconic 1989 comic "Nose Job," in which her alter ego refuses to assimilate through cosmetic surgery, Oksman's study is an arresting exploration of invention in the face of the pressure to disappear.


The Divine and Master Zhang

The Divine and Master Zhang

Author: Tanya Harter Pierce

Publisher:

Published: 2019-01-21

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9781733500708

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Every once in a while, a very special person walks the earth who is destined to live a non-ordinary life. When this person has extreme mystical, psychic, or other special abilities, and they use these abilities to help others, they are a true gift to humanity. Master Zhang is such a gift. As a spiritual healer of high Buddhist cultivation, Master Zhang transcends traditional Chinese medicine with her astounding paranormal abilities that go against long-accepted concepts of reality and laws of physics. One of these is her enigmatic talent of "grabbing medicine from the air," which is the ancient Chinese description of being able to make herbal medicine materialize out of thin air. Better than fiction, her story reads like an exotic tale, replete with dragons, spirit masters, levitation, visits from Kuan Yin, psychic visions, materializations, and teleportations. Though she endured great torment early in life because people did not understand her unusual powers, Master Zhang was eventually tested and vindicated by scientists in Beijing and officially endorsed by the Chinese government for her remarkable abilities. As her fame grew, her audiences in Asia grew to the thousands. She has been filmed for television in more than one country, and books have been written about her in China. For the very first time in English, the astonishing true story of Master Zhang's life and career is revealed in this book.


Mannequin Girl

Mannequin Girl

Author: Ellen Litman

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2014-03-17

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0393069281

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Growing up in Soviet Russia, Kat Knopman worships her parents, Jewish intellectuals who teach literature at a Moscow school, run a drama club, and dabble in political radicalism. When Kat is diagnosed with rapidly-progressing scoliosis, the trajectory of her life changes and she finds herself at a different institution-- a school-sanatorium for children with spinal ailments. Confined to a brace, surrounded by unsympathetic peers, Kat embarks on a quest to prove that she can be as exceptional as her parents despite her physical limitations, her Jewishness, and her suspicion that her beloved parents are in fact flawed.