By Gwendolyn Dawson The Finkler Question, Howard Jacobson’s latest novel and the winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, is an exploration of love, death, grief, friendship, and what it means to be Jewish in contemporary London. At the novel’s beginning, Julian Treslove is mugged after leaving a dinner party with his two best friends, Sam Finkler and Libor Sevick. …
Though New to Frankfurt, Iris Mor is No Newbie
By Chip Rossetti A newcomer to Frankfurt this year, Iris Mor, editor-in-chief of Israel’s Keter Books, is looking forward to meeting some of her growing list of contacts in person. Mor came to Keter last year from Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, where for fifteen years she had been the arts and culture editor, although she had always hoped to move to …
Israel’s Bookstore War
By Edward Nawotka ISRAEL: Hebrew Book Week started yesterday and — not unlike the Jewish holiday of Chanukah, where oil meant for a single day burned for eight — will miraculously last for ten days. Festivities are spread out across nine cities, while forty smaller towns will be hosting smaller three day events. Established in 1926 in Tel Aviv, it …
Bonus Material: Israeli Books in Various Languages
For much of the past decade, the National Library of Israel has been documenting the nation’s publishing scene and collecting statistics. For 2008, it reports 6,384 new books were published in the country in a variety of languages. Of those 5,621 titles were in Hebrew, followed by 368 in English, 206 in Russian, 121 in Arabic, 21 in Spanish, 18 …