What is Ari Y. Kelman reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Ari Y. Kelman, author of Station Identification: A Cultural History of Yiddish Radio in the United States.

One paragraph from his entry:

The most extraordinary book I’ve picked up lately is a graphic novel by an Italian artist named Gipi. The book (his second) is called Garage Band, and it follows a teenage band as they settle in to and then lose their practice space. The book is quiet but the story is beautifully told in spare sentences and fluid ink-and-water color drawings that capture a bit of the band’s rambunctiousness.[read on]

Ari Y. Kelman is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Davis.

Among the early praise for Station Identification:

"Station Identification represents a valuable and unique contribution to radio studies scholarship and to the cultural history of Yiddish in the United States. Ari Y. Kelman unearths the hitherto forgotten 'acoustic community' of Yiddish radio and demonstrates with impressive archival research that the story of Yiddish radio in the U.S. is inextricably woven together with the origins of American broadcasting. Uncanny and haimish, local and national, bilingual and ambivalent, Yiddish radio, like much early broadcasting, is the story of an audience tuning in to hear voices like their own."
—Jason Loviglio, author of Radio's Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy

Learn more about Station Identification at the University of California Press website, and visit Ari Y. Kelman's faculty webpage.

Writers Read: Ari Y. Kelman.

--Marshal Zeringue