Judith Kalman

Author of Called to Testify: The Big Story in My Small Life. Also the author of The County of Birches.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

Thanks @nyrbclassics for resurrecting another forgotten (in this case), or otherwise unknown-to-us novel. In More was Lost, Eleanor Perényi, an American living in pre-war sub-Carpathian Czechoslovakia/Hungary, vividly evoked this lost world through the clear eyes of an outsider.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

@OceanVuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a powerful and poetic cris de coeur from an immigrant boyhood and coming of age in an America that’s on the ropes. As gorgeously written as its title suggests. An @PenguinBooks.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

Foster by @CKeeganFiction, a novella that is perfectly wrought; and feels timeless in the way of all classics. Each line rings with emotional truth. A beauty of a book from @GrovePressUK.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

J. M. Coetzee’s The Pole and Other Stories from @HarkillSecker, start out like life, a bit of fun and games, and end up pressing our noses up hard against the glass between us and the pale. Unforgiving and necessary.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

@MarinerBooks has excelled again with guest editor Vivian Gornick’s The Best American Essay 2023. An annual treat.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

@coachhousebooks’ The Sleeping Car Porter by @suzettemayr was apt reading on the train from Toronto to Montreal and back.Puts you in the mood to take the train all the way across the country, but only as a passenger.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

Yet another entertaining read by Ann Patchett, Tom Lake will please readers and theatre folk alike. In Tom Lake, she parses the classic play, Our Town, through the lives of the characters who act in it. Our Town as translated into our time.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

Thanks @Tin_House for Ghassen Zeinnedine’s Dearborn. Good old fashioned, beautifully crafted short stories, about a world within a world, one that could be viewed and told only by an insider. Thanks, Ghassen Zeinnedine, for creating this window.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

The Wren, The Wren: Anne Enright at the top of her game. Two women of two generations walk off the page straight into your kitchen. Two separate worlds, each breathingly alive. Loved it, loved it.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

Another @LizStrout, Lucy by the Sea from @randomhouse, that succeeds in holding a mirror to our faces as few others can, in a prose so airy, the pages fly by like the very moments of our lives.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

@NYRB_Imprints and Len Rix, translator, thanks for giving us Hungarian writer Magda Szabó’s Abigail. Readers in English have waited too long for this writer for whom there are too few superlatives. I kept counting the pages ahead, wishing the novel would never end.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

Mireille Gansel’s prose poems in Soul House from @worldpoetrybook are seamlessly translated from French by @joansidney. Humanistic in concept, written in a language that invokes nature through all the senses, conversational in tone, these poems are a joy.

[Jeff S. Bray @JeffSBrayAuthor]

It is a eerie feeling when your house makes noises and no one is home but you. 👻

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

In All the Lovers in the night from @EuropaEditions, @mieko_kawakami has created one of the most mysterious characters in contemporary fiction. Intriguing from the first page through the last.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

My sister @ElaineKalman’s memoir of her relationship with our mother, Shoshanna’s Story, published by @McClellandBooks carried me through the week of our mother’s death. Anna Schwartz Kalman died on Sept. 21, 2023 at the age of 104, a matriarch of great strength and complexity.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

Not a widely known Canadian writer, Susan Olding should be. Her personal essays, Big Reader; Essays, are highly readable and noteworthy. Published by Freehand Books.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

Called a neglected classic, O Caledonian by Elspeth Barker is a model of its type, but a type defying classification. Not a standard coming-of-age period piece, the novel, itself essentially ‘other’, tells the story of a child born to not fit in to her Scottish family and world.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

Like much for Lorrie Moore’s work, A Gate at the Stairs is so much about language, each sentence a ride, a thrill in itself, you can forget to take note of the shape of the whole. Regardless, once you’ve started, you won’t be able to put it down.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

The voice in Susan Olding’s Pathologies: A Life in Essays is clear, unaffected, and convincingly honest. Each essay is a pleasure to read irrespective of the topics which manage to be diverse, while remaining deeply personal.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

@LyyPerr It's really hard to imagine any other incarnation of the character as she is so fully embodied on the page. Nice to talk about her with someone else who knew her well.

[Judith Kalman @JudithKalman]

Great reads of the summer: