-
1 month ago | 
audacity.substack.com | Kaveh Akbar |Danny M. Lavery |Regina Porter |Shalom Auslander
It’s not that I’m in a reading rut but I spent 2024 starting a lot of books I have not yet finished. I will finish them because I am an avowed reading completist but I do not know when. It’s frustrating that I’m struggling to find a book that I want to finish. Is it me? Is it the books? Both? I don’t know. If there was a recurring theme in the books I did finish last year, it was this sense of cringe, of the profound discomfort of watching people make absolutely terrible decisions over and over again.
-
Jan 10, 2025 | 
persuasion.community | Shalom Auslander
“In the goodness of my heart I am bringing him to the fair, where I hope to get a good price for him. The truth is you can’t drive such creatures away. The best thing would be to kill them.”- Pozzo, Waiting for GodotThe murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4, 2024 ignited a furious and macabre debate: did he deserve it? According to a recent Emerson poll, young voters aged 18-29 are split, 40% saying the killing was acceptable and 40% saying it was not.
-
Sep 17, 2024 | 
ft.com | Shalom Auslander
When I was younger, I loved fancy pens.
-
Jul 30, 2024 | 
shtetl.org | Shalom Auslander
In his new memoir, Feh, which was published last Tuesday from Penguin Random House, Haredi misfit author Shalom Auslander looks back at his time as a child at Yeshiva of Spring Valley in the 1970s. Auslander, whose previous memoir Foreskin’s Lament also explored his Orthodox background, centers his new book around the idea of “feh.” This Yiddish interpolation stands for Auslander as the story, which he says he first heard as a child, that says everyone sucks, especially himself.
-
Jul 26, 2024 | 
tabletmag.com | Shalom Auslander
Once upon a time, Rabbi Scold had told us, Jacob wrestled with an angel. They wrestled all night, hour after hour, from evening to morning, neither one willing to relent or surrender, but it was nothing compared to how I wrestled that evening with my mother’s pantyhose. For what seemed like hours, I tried to figure out how to get the damned things on, as it was impossible to tell the front from the back, or even if there was a front or back. I grew irritated, angry. Would a label have killed them?
-
Jul 24, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Shalom Auslander
FEH: A Memoir, by Shalom AuslanderThat much of writing is not writing, or rewriting, or outright trashing what one has written, is a well-worn truth of the trade, fascinating maybe only to practitioners. But Shalom Auslander is a truth teller whose punim you want to pinch - at which point he'd worry that you found him fat.
-
Jul 23, 2024 | 
lithub.com | Shalom Auslander
The morning of my blinding began like any other. Article continues belowI was in the first grade, six years of age, perhaps seven, at the ultra‑Orthodox Yeshiva of Spring Valley in a town in rural New York named Monsey, waiting for class to begin. Some boys stood at the back of the classroom, laughing and joking and flipping baseball cards. Others sat on the floor and played kugelach, the Jewish version of jacks. Suddenly the door flew open, and a bearded man in a long black coat hurried in.
-
Jun 24, 2024 | 
persuasion.community | Shalom Auslander
As the election approaches and the words “division,” “friction” and “fractured” become ever more commonly used to describe the state of our union, we want to take a moment to thank everyone here at the Shit-Stirring Department for all your hard work. Thanks to your continued efforts and relentless negativity, any disagreements Americans have on issues large and small have been magnified into nearly insoluble problems.
-
May 24, 2024 | 
libraryjournal.com | Shalom Auslander
.
Jul. 2024.
368p.
ISBN 9780735213265. $29.
MEMOIR
COPY ISBN
Showtime’s
Happyish creator and novelist/memoirist Auslander (Mother for Dinner) blends both a sense of despair and a self-deprecating whimsy in his latest memoir. It’s an approach he handles tremendously well. Part personal history, part self-examination, and part social commentary, his book addresses everything from Kafka to capitalism.
-
May 1, 2024 | 
persuasion.community | Shalom Auslander
Because I am Jewish, friends send me news about Jews, even though I’ve repeatedly asked all my friends to never send me news at all, regardless of their religious or racial focus. This is for two reasons. The first reason I avoid news is because I suffer, like most people today, from Constant News Negativity, or CNN for short, coupled with debilitating FOX (Frenzy of Outright Exaggeration), both of these results of the Information Anxiety Complex (IAC).
