News - Gabriel Josipovici

After
and
Making Mistakes,
two new novels by Gabriel Josipovici, will be published in one volume by Carcanet in August of this year. More information here --

"Gabriel Josipovici: The Writer as Critic" by David Herman, an article chronicling his long and varied career, appears in the Fall 2008-Winter 2009 issue of the journal Salmagundi. But it is not, alas, available on line.

A front-page review of the first volume of Samuel Beckett's letters by Gabriel Josipovici in the Times Literary Supplement of 11 March 2009 is available on line.

A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity
Gabriel Josipovici has contributed the essay, "Cousins" to this collection of the Independing Jewish Voices on the Middle East. A pdf of the essay is here, thanks to ReadySteadyBlog and Verso Books, the publisher.

Writer in Time: Tamara Yellin interviews Gabriel Josipovici in the Jewish Daily Forward of 4 March 2009 about his dedication to the modern European tradition in fiction. Missing from the online version is this paragraph:

Born in Nice in 1940, Josipovici escaped with his mother to Egypt in 1945 and in 1956 arrived in England, where he has lived ever since. This background of displacement has doubtless contributed to his unique sensibility. His locations and characters are often mundanely English, yet there is an alertness and unease in their portrayal which is rarely found among English Jewish writers: the alertness of a writer who has the stone of dislocation forever in his shoe.

What happened to the Avant Garde? is the subject of a debate to be led by Gabriel Josipovici, A.S. Byatt, and others, 3 December 2008, at the British Library; part of the event called Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937, consisting of talks, films, discussions, comedy, music and more: celebrating the spirit of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937 details here.

A new story by Gabriel Josipovici, "He Contemplates a Photo in a Newspaper," appears in the November 2007 issue of a new journal, The International Literary Quarterly.

Staying news: Ismo Santala has written a substantial review of Gabriel Josipovici's first novel (1968), The Inventory, for the UK literary site Ready Steady Book.

"The Dark Waters" is a story by Gabriel Josipovici now appearing in the Eclectic England section of the Mad Hatter's Review.

Gabriel Josipovici was a participant in Kisufim - Jerusalem Conference of Jewish Writers: “To Be A Jewish Writer” which took place 28 Nisan--1 Iyar 5767 (April 16-19, 2007), the first international conference of its kind of Jewish writers and poets throughout the world. It was organized by Dimui : A Journal of Jewish Arts, Literature and Culture, Beit Morasha of Jerusalem, and marked the 40th anniversary of the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to S.Y. Agnon

On the occasion of Goldberg: Variations appearing in the US, Michael Signorelli interviewed Gabriel Josipovici for his blog Cruelest Month.

What ever happened to Modernism? Gabriel Josipovici's John Coffin Lecture in Literature on this subject, at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies of the University of London's School of Advanced Study, on March 14th, was very well attended. A blog account isat Ellis Sharp's The Sharp Side.

Jewish Book Week features
Gabriel Josipovici in Conversation with Bryan Cheyette
http://jewishbookweek.com/2007/040307a.php
on Sunday, March 4, 2007.

A substantial interview with Gabriel Josipovici by Mark Thwaite is on his literary web site, Ready Steady Book.

Only Joking, not yet available in English, has been published in German as Nur ein Scherz. Information from the publisher is here, a review in Der Spiegel in German is here, in English here.

Two new Gabriel Josipovici titles in 2006:

The Singer on the Shore, a collection of essays and reviews, March 2006, from Carcanet Press,

Reviewed in The Guardian

and

Everything Passes, a novel, also from Carcanet Press, September 2006 (now at Amazon UK).

Why do we need another edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales? Are there not already several complete editions in English and any number of picture-book selections for children, with new ones appearing every Christmas? Instead of answering this question directly let us take another example of a "world's classic", the Bible. Though there are countless editions of the Bible around, and a large number of commentaries, OUP's World's Classics edition, published in 1997, filled a yawning gap. Edited by Robert Carroll, an Old Testament scholar with a real feeling for literature, and Stephen Prickett, a literary critic and scholar with a strong interest in the Bible and its afterlife in literature, this contained a long and extremely interesting introduction and copious footnotes. It did not try to summarize the many biblical commentaries, which tend to be theological and historical, but rather to raise questions about the Bible as a book and a great literary document, which of course it is, as well as being a cultural and religious one. In a similar way, Joyce Crick, a fine scholar of German literature who has always been adept at addressing a larger audience than simply her fellow Germanisten, has set out here to rescue Grimm's Tales both from children and from folklorists and to help us see it as a major literary work. Like Carroll and Prickett, she has done a magnificent job, and both she and OUP are to be congratulated.

An introduction by Gabriel Josipovici to Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 in the new Penguin Modern Classics edition.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0141188200/

Gabriel Josipovici gave a reading at Shakespeare & Company in Paris
on Saturday, May 28th, at 7 pm.

A recent appearance was at Ajex Hall, Palmeira Avenue, Hove on November 7 for the 2004 Bill Epstein Memorial Lecture, How to Read the Bible, on understanding the nature of an ancient text and of our own modern readerly decisions, and bringing the Bible to life as a multi-faceted and open work.

Gabriel Josipovici recently completed a semester as visiting professor at the American University in Paris, where he gave a talk in February 2004...

	Current & Recent
	GJ in Bloggerland substantial entries
	After and *Making Mistakes, two new novels by Gabriel Josipovici, will be published in one volume by Carcanet in August of this year. More information here --*
	"Gabriel Josipovici: The Writer as Critic" by David Herman, an article chronicling his long and varied career, appears in the Fall 2008-Winter 2009 issue of the journal Salmagundi. But it is not, alas, available on line.
	A front-page review of the first volume of Samuel Beckett's letters by Gabriel Josipovici in the Times Literary Supplement of 11 March 2009 is available on line.
	A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity Gabriel Josipovici has contributed the essay, "Cousins" to this collection of the Independing Jewish Voices on the Middle East. A pdf of the essay is here, thanks to ReadySteadyBlog and Verso Books, the publisher.
	Writer in Time: Tamara Yellin interviews Gabriel Josipovici in the Jewish Daily Forward of 4 March 2009 about his dedication to the modern European tradition in fiction. Missing from the online version is this paragraph: Born in Nice in 1940, Josipovici escaped with his mother to Egypt in 1945 and in 1956 arrived in England, where he has lived ever since. This background of displacement has doubtless contributed to his unique sensibility. His locations and characters are often mundanely English, yet there is an alertness and unease in their portrayal which is rarely found among English Jewish writers: the alertness of a writer who has the stone of dislocation forever in his shoe.
	What happened to the Avant Garde? is the subject of a debate to be led by Gabriel Josipovici, A.S. Byatt, and others, 3 December 2008, at the British Library; part of the event called Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937, consisting of talks, films, discussions, comedy, music and more: celebrating the spirit of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937 details here.
	A new story by Gabriel Josipovici, "He Contemplates a Photo in a Newspaper," appears in the November 2007 issue of a new journal, The International Literary Quarterly.
	Staying news: Ismo Santala has written a substantial review of Gabriel Josipovici's first novel (1968), The Inventory, for the UK literary site Ready Steady Book.
	"The Dark Waters" is a story by Gabriel Josipovici now appearing in the Eclectic England section of the Mad Hatter's Review.
	Gabriel Josipovici was a participant in Kisufim - Jerusalem Conference of Jewish Writers: “To Be A Jewish Writer” which took place 28 Nisan--1 Iyar 5767 (April 16-19, 2007), the first international conference of its kind of Jewish writers and poets throughout the world. It was organized by Dimui : A Journal of Jewish Arts, Literature and Culture, Beit Morasha of Jerusalem, and marked the 40th anniversary of the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to S.Y. Agnon
	On the occasion of Goldberg: Variations appearing in the US, Michael Signorelli interviewed Gabriel Josipovici for his blog Cruelest Month.
	What ever happened to Modernism? Gabriel Josipovici's John Coffin Lecture in Literature on this subject, at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies of the University of London's School of Advanced Study, on March 14th, was very well attended. A blog account isat Ellis Sharp's The Sharp Side.
	Jewish Book Week features Gabriel Josipovici in Conversation with Bryan Cheyette http://jewishbookweek.com/2007/040307a.php on Sunday, March 4, 2007.
	A substantial interview with Gabriel Josipovici by Mark Thwaite is on his literary web site, Ready Steady Book.
	Only Joking, not yet available in English, has been published in German as Nur ein Scherz. Information from the publisher is here, a review in Der Spiegel in German is here, in English here.
	Two new Gabriel Josipovici titles in 2006: The Singer on the Shore, a collection of essays and reviews, March 2006, from Carcanet Press, Reviewed in The Guardian and Everything Passes, a novel, also from Carcanet Press, September 2006 (now at Amazon UK).
A major essay, "By a cool well: where to find the princesses and their frogs" in the 8th July 2005 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, reviewing Selected Tales: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, edited and translated by Joyce Crick, Oxford University Press. Opening paragraphs: Why do we need another edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales? Are there not already several complete editions in English and any number of picture-book selections for children, with new ones appearing every Christmas? Instead of answering this question directly let us take another example of a "world's classic", the Bible. Though there are countless editions of the Bible around, and a large number of commentaries, OUP's World's Classics edition, published in 1997, filled a yawning gap. Edited by Robert Carroll, an Old Testament scholar with a real feeling for literature, and Stephen Prickett, a literary critic and scholar with a strong interest in the Bible and its afterlife in literature, this contained a long and extremely interesting introduction and copious footnotes. It did not try to summarize the many biblical commentaries, which tend to be theological and historical, but rather to raise questions about the Bible as a book and a great literary document, which of course it is, as well as being a cultural and religious one. In a similar way, Joyce Crick, a fine scholar of German literature who has always been adept at addressing a larger audience than simply her fellow Germanisten, has set out here to rescue Grimm's Tales both from children and from folklorists and to help us see it as a major literary work. Like Carroll and Prickett, she has done a magnificent job, and both she and OUP are to be congratulated. For too long these haunting tales have been pulled out of context and subjected to mythological and psychological exegesis. Crick has done us an enormous service by returning them to their context in the Germanic lands of early modern Europe (Brueghel has always seemed to me a better key to their interpretation than Freud, Marx, or Mircea Eliade). Though she does not include some of my favourite stories (the wonderfully surreal "Herr Korbes" and "Lauschen und Flohchen", for example), and though she can do nothing about conveying the huge linguistic range of the collection, this is nevertheless a volume to treasure. Full text available to TLS subscribers at http://www.the-tls.co.uk/archive/story.aspx?story_id=2111602
An introduction by Gabriel Josipovici to Aharon Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 in the new Penguin Modern Classics edition. http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0141188200/
Gabriel Josipovici gave a reading at Shakespeare & Company in Paris on Saturday, May 28th, at 7 pm.
A recent appearance was at Ajex Hall, Palmeira Avenue, Hove on November 7 for the 2004 Bill Epstein Memorial Lecture, How to Read the Bible, on understanding the nature of an ancient text and of our own modern readerly decisions, and bringing the Bible to life as a multi-faceted and open work.
Gabriel Josipovici recently completed a semester as visiting professor at the American University in Paris, where he gave a talk in February 2004...