Stories for living

Let's read Israeli and Palestinian authors together.

Dear friends,

In this newsletter you will find no links to stuff to buy for your loved ones, not even books. I have no tips for surviving holiday dinners with relatives, no recommendations for self-care or seasonal fun with kids. There will be no top-ten list.

That’s not what you come to me for. Maybe you came here first via your interest in Shirley Jackson, Anne Frank, or another author I’ve written about. But you stayed because you love literature and you take it seriously. And this is a space for people who believe in literature.

So I’ve decided to try something new. Last month, I mentioned that I’m interested in reading fiction by Israeli and Palestinian authors. More than newspapers, more than talking heads, and definitely more than Twitter or whatever it’s become, I believe literature can help us expand our understanding of the current conflict, its history, and its real impact on people—in the region and elsewhere.

As Joan Didion wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live … We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”

I don’t want to do this alone. I want to do it with a community of engaged readers and interpreters. So I’m asking you to join me.

Every month or so, we’ll read a work of fiction by an Israeli or Palestinian author, or by a writer from somewhere else who has something meaningful to say about the conflict. We’ll discuss it in a Substack Thread open to all subscribers. I’ll start us off with some thoughts and questions, similar to the way I did for The Haunting of Hill House at APS Together. If you’ve never commented on a Substack Thread—I have never started one before!—it’s very intuitive.

Everyone who joins in good faith is welcome. This isn’t a place for political sloganeering, but for respectful, engaged conversation. Of course, no hate speech of any kind will be tolerated. And yes, it’s free.

And I’ll continue to write about the things you expect in this space: the backstory on the literary journalism I publish, updates on my new book about Anne Frank (which still needs a title!) as it moves through the production process, and other news from the literary world. In the coming year, I hope to have something to say about a new project relating to literary criticism and the ways we read now.

But this feels like the right thing for the current moment.

The first novel will be Minor Detail by Palestinian writer Adania Shibli. I welcome your suggestions of other works—Israeli and Palestinian—to choose next. I’ll start the Substack Thread later this week and it will remain open all month.

The cover of the American edition of Shibli’s novel.

Some of my Jewish readers—and others—may be upset by this book. Its portrayal of Israelis is negative, although not without complication. It’s based on the rape and murder of a Bedouin girl by an Israeli army commando in 1949—an incident that the newspaper Haaretz, in a long feature about it (which figures in the novel), called “one of the ugliest and most appalling episodes in the history of the Israel Defense Forces.” At a time when the scope of Hamas’s campaign of sexual violence against Israeli women is only starting to become clear, this choice of plot may seem insensitive. On a literary level, the novel’s spare, unemotional style will not appeal to everyone.

Despite these issues, I believe the novel is well worth reading. Shibli portrays contemporary Palestinian experience in a way I haven’t seen in literature before. And, as a writer with a particular interest in the representation of women’s experience through history, I’m sympathetic to the quest of the character at the center of the second half of the book, a Palestinian woman who attempts to investigate the 1949 incident in Israeli archives and elsewhere.

And much of Minor Detail takes place in exactly the area that Hamas attacked on October 7. The protagonist’s quest even takes her to one of the kibbutzim that Hamas targeted. For this reason, the book has extra resonance now.

Physical copies of Minor Detail have been on back order for at least a month, so this is a good time to use your e-reader or your local public library. New Directions, the publisher, assures me that more are being printed. If you can’t get access to the book but wish to participate, please email me at shirleyjacksonbio@gmail.com.

What I’m reading

About a month ago, this sweet creature entered our lives. He’s a corgi/lab mix, probably with a few other things besides. After much debate and discussion, we settled on Obi (Wan Kenobi) as his name.

I seem to have become a person who takes selfies with her dog.

All I’ve read over the last few weeks are books about dogs, including the entire corpus of the Monks of New Skete (IYKYK), Pack of Two by Caroline Knapp, and The Year of the Puppy by Alexandra Horowitz. (My favorite takeaway from the last one: even Horowitz, a dog behaviorist, sometimes finds her new puppy to be … a lot.) What else do you recommend? Please let me know in the comments.

As ever,

Ruth