The Family Markowitz: Fiction - Softcover

Goodman, Allegra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812984552 ISBN 13: 9780812984552

Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback, 2017

Synopsis

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK · From the author of The Chalk Artist, this beloved collection of linked stories is “one of the most astute and engaging books about American family life to have come our way in quite a while” (The Boston Globe).

In this beloved collection of linked short stories, Allegra Goodman writes with wit and compassion about three generations of Markowitzes: Rose, the displaced, cantankerous matriarch; her devoted son, Henry, an aesthete living abroad; his younger brother, Ed, a Georgetown scholar specializing in terrorism; Ed’s wife, Sarah, a housewife with stalled literary ambitions; and their eldest daughter, Miriam, whose budding Orthodoxy bewilders her parents. Through the rhythm of ordinary family rituals—weddings, holiday dinners, hospital vigils—Goodman breathes extraordinary life into a cast of characters who reverberate with authenticity and never fail to speak their minds.

Praise for The Family Markowitz

“These stories sound like no one else’s. . . . Goodman is brilliant at capturing the clutter of both interior and exterior life.”—Los Angeles Times

“Entertaining . . . The Family Markowitz has great consistency and charm.”—Claire Messud, The New York Times Book Review

“A revelation . . . Goodman’s prose has a steady, silent reserve that always indicates she has bigger things in mind.”—Dwight Garner, Salon

“One of the most astute and engaging books about American family life to have come our way in quite a while . . . [Allegra Goodman] has a gift for conveying the peculiar subtleties of Jewish culture.”—The Boston Globe

“Funny and wise and keenly observed . . . one of the most engaging, maddening, and recognizable families to come along in years . . . an enchanting book.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times 

About this title

Review:

The stories in this collection are so linked and consistent, the book is almost a novel. It tells the comic and endearing history of a family of archetypal American Jews. Rose, the finicky and irrational Jewish mother, becomes increasingly dependent on Percodan and on her two sons, Ed, a hard-headed academic, and Henry, an arty dilettante. Ed's writer wife Sara suffers through teaching creative writing at the local Jewish Community Center. Ed painfully endures an interfaith weekend with crushingly banal Christian ecumenists, even though both he and Sara are completely irreligious. Meanwhile their daughter Miriam alarms them by rediscovering Judaism. Goodman, whose stories appear regularly in the New Yorker, delights the reader with recognition of the funny in the familiar.

About the Author:

Allegra Goodman’s novels include The Chalk Artist, The Cookbook Collector, and Intuition. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories. She is a winner of the Whiting Writer’s Award and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

About this edition

• Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0812984552
• ISBN 13: 9780812984552
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304