Singer's Typewriter and Mine: Reflections on Jewish Culture (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780803271364)

A cultural critic of extraordinary erudition, encyclopedic knowledge, and boundless curiosity, Ilan Stavans, an Ashkenazic Jew who grew up in Mexico, negotiates wildly varied topics as effortlessly and deftly as he manages the multiple perspectives of a dual national, religious, and ethnic identity. In Singer's Typewriter and Mine, a follow-up to The Inveterate Dreamer (Nebraska, 2001), Stavans interweaves his own experience with that of other Jewish writers and thinkers, past and present, to explore modern Jewish culture across the boundaries of language and nation. Juxtaposing the personal and the analytical, these essays and conversations take up the oeuvres of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Mario Vargas Llosa, translation and God's language, storytelling as midrash, anti-Semitism in Hispanic America, Yiddish and Sephardic literatures, the connection between humor and terror, impostors as cultural agents, the creators of the King James Bible, and the encounter between Jewish and Latino civilizations, to name but a few of Stavans's topics here. Funny, engaging, and provocative, this collection continues Stavans's project of opening new vistas in our cross-cultural understanding of language, literature, and life.


Author: Ilan Stavans
ISBN-10: 0803271360
ISBN-13: 9780803271364
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Language: English
Published: 11/01/2012
Pages: 368
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.23lbs
Size: 9.38h x 5.83w x 0.80d

Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 09/15/2012
Publishers Weekly 10/29/2012
Booklist 11/15/2012 pg. 17
Choice 06/01/2013