I occasionally 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 haven’t been writing fiction lately, but maybe I’ll pull something out of the drawer and hack away at it one of these days.

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).