Nextbook: Local Programs

Jules Feiffer <IMG SRC="http://www.nextbook.org/images/event_jfeiffer_20045.jpg" width=80 hspace=5 vspace=0 align=right> October 11 2004, 7:30 PM Washington DCJCC October 12 2004, 7:30 PM City of Fairfax Old Town Hall "I was always drawn to the befuddled, bemused figure," says Jules Feiffer. Born in the Bronx, Feiffer has written plays, novels, and screenplays, but is still best known for his Pulitzer PrizeÐwinning cartoons, featuring characters like Bernard Mergendeiler: "Work reminds me of girls, lunch reminds me of girls, music reminds me of girls ... marriage reminds me of death ... I don't know how I'm going to work this out." In the last decade, Feiffer has turned to writing children's books, including The Man in the Ceiling, I Lost My Bear, and The Daddy Mountain. The Washington, DC event is co-sponsored by the Hyman S. & Freda Bernstein Jewish Literary Festival. Allegra Goodman <IMG SRC="http://www.nextbook.org/images/event_agoodman_20045.jpg" width=80 hspace=5 vspace=0 align=right> November 15 2004, 7:30 PM Washington DCJCC November 16 2004, 7:30 PM George Mason Regional Library Born in Brooklyn but raised in Hawaii, Allegra Goodman published her first book in 1989 while still an undergraduate at Harvard. Since then, she has written The Family Markowitz, a collection of interlinked stories, and two acclaimed novels. In Kaaterskill Falls, Elizabeth Shulman, a wife with five children, longs for a life outside her strict Orthodox community, while Rabbi Kirshner struggles to choose a successor. In Paradise Park, a young woman abandoned by her boyfriend in Waikiki looks for enlightenment in all the wrong places. Goodman received a Whiting Writers' Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Jonathan Rosen <IMG SRC="http://www.nextbook.org/images/event_jrosen_20045.jpg" width=80 hspace=5 vspace=0 align=right> November 29 2004, 7:30 PM Washington DCJCC November 30 2004, 7:30 PM Centreville Regional Library Deborah Green is a rabbi who has been convinced since childhood that God lives within her, until, one evening, she looks at the moon and sees "a limbless bust of marble." Lev Friedman is a science writer who wants to learn the Kaddish prayer for his father, a Holocaust survivor who may not survive his own despair. In Joy Comes in the Morning, Jonathan Rosen portrays Deborah and Lev's longing for faith and one another not as exotic romance, but as the classic American story. Rosen is the author of The Talmud and the Internet and Eve's Apple. Andr Aciman <IMG SRC="http://www.nextbook.org/images/event_aaciman_20045.jpg" width=80 hspace=5 vspace=0 align=right> January 24 2005, 7:30 PM Washington DCJCC January 25 2005, 7:30 PM Kings Park Library Perpetually displaced, André Aciman looks forward to longing. "This is how I always travel: not so as to experience anything at the time of my tour, but to plot the itinerary of a possible return trip," he writes in False Papers, a collection of essays. In Out of Egypt, he recounts his childhood in that country, where his family prospered for three generations before a new government forced them into exile. Aciman's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Best American Essays. Savyon Liebrecht <IMG SRC="http://www.nextbook.org/images/event_ssavyon_20045.jpg" width=80 hspace=5 vspace=0 align=right> March 7 2005, 7:30 PM Washington DCJCC March 8 2005, 7:30 PM Pohick Regional Library Israeli novelist Savyon Liebrecht examines everyday lives caught within the forces of historical conflicta Jewish woman who hires three Arabs to build an extension onto her home; a Holocaust survivor who ruins every party with tales of concentration camps; an Orthodox mother who visits her daughter on a secular kibbutz. Born in 1948 in Munich to Holocaust survivors, Liebrecht immigrated to Israel as an infant. Her books include Apples from the Desert and A Man and a Woman and a Man. Tony Kushner <IMG SRC="http://www.nextbook.org/images/event_tkushner_20045.jpg" width=80 hspace=5 vspace=0 align=right> April 11 2005, 7:30 PM Washington DCJCC April 12 2005, 7:30 PM Alden Theatre One of the most celebrated playwrights of the last 20 years, Tony Kushner joins the personal and political, tackling AIDS in Angels in America; Afghanistan in Homebody/Kabul; and, most recently, race and social revolution in the musical Caroline, or Change. Kushner is also the author of Brundibar, a children's book based on the 1938 opera, and co-editor of Wrestling with Zion. He has received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and two Tony awards. Rebecca Goldstein <IMG SRC="http://www.nextbook.org/images/ws-goldstein.jpg" width=80 hspace=5 vspace=0 align=right> May 23 2005, 7:30 PM Washington DCJCC May 24 2005, 7:30 PM Reston Regional Library "I'm often asked what it's like to be married to a genius." These words came to Rebecca Goldstein one morning as she dressed for work; they became the opening line of her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem, and the young philosophy professor found herself with a second career as a novelist. Raised in an Orthodox household and trained as an analytic philosopher, Goldstein creates stories of philosophers, physicists, and mathematicians who struggle with everyday dilemmas of family, passion, and betrayal. Her new book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel, will be published in February.