In addition to my academic and critical writing, I also write fiction. I won some prizes for this in school, including a Hopwood Award from the University of Michigan, and I’ve had a little luck in terms of a residency at the MacDowell Colony, as well as a couple of decent publications. In case you’re interested in these, I’ll mention them, below, and include some links. I’m hoping there’ll be more to discuss here soon.

If you’ve read something I’ve written and been moved or intrigued by it — this goes for the reviews and essays, too, of course, but particularly for the stories — I would love to hear from you. Please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Published stories:

“The Lewisburg Minyan.” A quasi-historical fiction about jail, prostitution, Yiddish, and pornography, in the form of a letter from a grandfather to his adolescent grandson–and, yes, the absence of commas here is intentional, thank you very much–appeared in StoryQuarterly 43 (2009). (Click here for a PDF.)

“Berenstein’s Plague.”  Set in a counterfactual Jewish nationalist colony in East Africa at the turn of the 20th century, this story took 2nd place in the 2003 short fiction contest run by Moment, a Jewish magazine published out of Washington, D.C. (losing out to a sharp story by a great writer, Edward Shwarzschild). My story was eventually published in the magazine in August of 2005. (Click here for a PDF.)

“The Brief Summer of Amir & Ariella — an Allegory.” A tale of summer camp romance in the mountains of Quebec, this piece first appeared in Parchment: Contemporary Canadian Jewish Writing, and was reprinted in a revised version in Eric Simonoff’s anthology Sleepaway: Writers on Summer Camp (Riverhead, 2005), alongside the work of some wonderful writers, including Margaret Atwood and David Sedaris. (Click here for a PDF of the story as it appeared there.) Here are a few reviews of the anthology, in USA Today, The Forward, and the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent. Finally, the story was read aloud by Jacob Weber for publication on Nextbook.org; if you’d like, you can download an MP3 of that reading (though it’ll take a while, as it’s 25 MB).