The Family Markowitz - Hardcover

Goodman, Allegra

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374153213 ISBN 13: 9780374153212

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1996

Synopsis

Told through weddings, deaths, holiday dinners, and dreams, the story of three generations of the Markowitzes is revealed

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: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0374153213
• ISBN 13: 9780374153212
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 262