A Panel Reading and Discussion

Harvard Book Store and Harvard Hillel are pleased to host fiction writers ELISA ALBERT, RACHEL KADISH, JOAN LEEGANT, TOVA MIRVIS, and JONATHAN WILSON, who will read from their stories in the new anthology, Promised Lands: New Jewish American Fiction on Longing and Belonging, edited by Derek Rubin.
 
A 2010 National Jewish Book Award finalist, this anthology showcases new, unpublished short stories by a rapidly growing crop of highly talented young Jewish American writers. Cohering around the core Jewish theme of the Promised Land, all the stories were written especially for this volume. With the kind of depth and imagination that only fiction allows, they offer striking variations on the multivalent theme of the Promised Land and how it continues to shape the collective consciousness of contemporary American Jews. Promised Lands provides a rich reading experience and a unique window onto Jewish American life and culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Derek Rubin will introduce the anthology and the readings from the stories will be followed by a discussion with the audience.

The Panel

Elisa Albert is the author of the novel The Book of Dahlia and the short-story collection How This Night is Different, and the editor of the anthology Freud's Blind Spot.

Rachel Kadish is the author of the novels From a Sealed Room and Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story.

Joan Leegant is the author of the story collection An Hour in Paradise and the novel Wherever You Go.

Tova Mirvis is the author of the novels The Ladies Auxiliary and The Outside World.

Jonathan Wilson is the author of the novels The Hiding Room and A Palestine Affair, the short story-collections Schoom and An Ambulance Is on the Way: Stories of Men in Trouble, the biography Marc Chagall, and two critical works on the fiction of Saul Bellow.

Derek Rubin teaches in the English Department and the American Studies Program at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Among others, he is the editor of the essay anthology Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer, which won the National Jewish Book Award.