Contemporary Jewish American Narrative: A Selected Bibliography

What follows is a selected bibliography related to current Jewish American novels and short fiction. The list of primary texts is somewhat extensive, and it should give the reader/scholar a broad sense of what kind of writing is being done. Working from an assumption that in many ways chronological groupings are somewhat relative, the authors that are listed here represent the most recent generation and began publishing after 1980. The vast majority of them published their first works in the late-1980s or, more likely than not, the 1990s. The age of the author, while not an overriding issue, was nonetheless a factor in the selection. Several authors who began their publishing careers before the 1980s, such as Max Apple, Leslie Epstein, Mark Helprin, and Francine Prose, are excluded from this list, although they might be currently active writers. (One could even go so far as to call this “earlier” cluster of “more recent” writers a transitional group, anticipating the shift between the Bellow-Malamud-Roth-Ozick generation and the most recent one.) Other writers, such as Steve Stern and Tova Reich, who are “older,” chronologically speaking, than the vast majority in this list, are included due to their relatively recent beginnings as authors or due to the significance of their most recent work.¹

Writers whose works unquestionably involve Jewish issues—e.g., Allegra Goodman, Melvin Jules Bukiet, and Thane Rosenbaum—are included along with those authors whose focus is marginally, if at all, concerned with Jewishness. The latter—including such prolific authors as Sarah Schulman, Amy Bloom, David Leavitt, and up until recently, Michael Chabon—are rarely collected in any books or listed in any catalog representing Jewish American writers, but their contributions are certainly significant and deserve serious attention.²

Some of the collections listed here, such as the Norton anthology and Bukiet’s Neurotica, do not specifically focus on post-1980 Jewish American fiction, but a significant portion of each text is devoted to such writing. Of the secondary sources, only those works that primarily concern the younger generation of writers, as a whole, are included. Some works that devote only portions of the text to these discussions are also included. However, essays that concern only one specific author and do not consider the larger context of recent Jewish American writing are not included here.

If the book has been reprinted from a previous edition, or if it has been put out in paperback form under an imprint or a different press, then complete publishing information is given for both. In every case only the original and the most recent publishing information is included. If, as is the case in the first two entries, the paperback publishing details differ from the hardback only in year, then the most recent publishing information is listed along with the original year publication.

Primary Sources

Novels and Short Fiction

Abraham, Pearl. Giving Up America. 1998. New York: Riverhead-Putnam, 1999.

—. The Romance Reader. New York: Riverhead, 1995. New York: Riverhead-Putnam, 1996.

Almond, Steve. My Life in Heavy Metal: Stories. 2002. New York: Grove, 2003.

Ascher, Carol. Flood: A Novel. Freedom, CA : Crossing, 1987. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone, 1996.

Bender, Aimee. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories. 1998. New York: Doubleday, 1999.

—. An Invisible Sign of My Own. New York: Doubleday, 2000. New York: Knopf-Random, 2001.

Black, David. An Impossible Life: A Novel, a Bobeh Myseh: A Novel. Wakefield, RI: Moyer Bell, 1998.

Bloom, Amy. A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You: Stories. New York: Random, 2000. New York: Vintage-Random, 2001.

—. Come to Me: Stories. New York: Harper, 1993. New York: Perennial-Harper, 1994.

—. Love Invents Us. New York: Random, 1997. New York: Vintage-Random, 1998.

Bloom, Steven. No New Jokes: A Novel. New York: Norton, 1997.

Brownstein, Gabriel. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Apt. 3W. 2002. New York: Norton, 2003.

Budnitz, Judy. Flying Leap: Stories. 1998. New York: Picador, 1999.

—. If I Told You Once: A Novel. 1999. New York: Picador, 2000.

Bukiet, Melvin Jules. After. New York: St. Martin's, 1996.

—. A Faker's...