David Burr Gerrard
DAVID BURR GERRARD is the author of the novels The Epiphany Machine (Putnam, 2017) and Short Century (Rare Bird, 2014). His fiction has appeared in Playboy, Guernica, NY Tyrant, Joyland, and elsewhere. He teaches fiction writing at the New School, Catapult, and the 92nd St. Y, and lives with his wife in Queens, New York.
This propulsive and playful book, Hysteria—which is reminiscent of the work of Philip Roth and the feverish novellas of Elena Ferrante—demands to be read in one sitting. I read it one night at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown.
There is more to the phrase “here we are” than its lack of varnish. It addresses the question that hovers over this memoir and over most of Roth’s work—of how to face death when one believes that there is no life after death, when the atheists’ booth looks so sad.
Paul Goldberg’s excellent first novel, The Yid, invented an assassination plot against Joseph Stalin in late February of 1953, to stop a genocide that Stalin may have been planning against the Soviet Jews who had not been murdered by Hitler.
In December, I met Hermione Hoby to discuss her debut novel at Milk and Roses, a book-lined Greenpoint café that is the sort of place aspiring artists and intellectuals move to New York with dreams of finding and that usually does not last much longer than does a blazing revelation. (Though let us hope the gods of real estate spare Milk and Roses.)
