Monday, April 20, 2009

What is Steven Zipperstein reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Steven Zipperstein, author of the newly released Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (Yale University Press).

One book mentioned in his entry:
Penelope Fizergerald’s droll masterpiece from the 1970s, still in-print I think – The Bookshop – is a bracing reminder, all the more crucial now, of the disruptive, essential power of books. I reread it often.[read on]
Read an excerpt from Zipperstein's Rosenfeld’s Lives, and discover more about the book at the Yale University Press website.

Steven J. Zipperstein’s is the Koshland Professor of Jewish Culture and History at Stanford, and has just spent two years at Harvard. He has written widely on Russian and East European Jewish history, and among his books are histories of the Jews of Odessa, and a biography of the leading intellectual of Zionism who was also its prime internal critic in the movement’s formative years, the essayist Ahad Ha’am. Zipperstein is now at work on a cultural history of Russian Jewry for Houghton Mifflin and Company.

Learn more about Steven Zipperstein's scholarship at his Stanford webpage.

Writers Read: Steven Zipperstein.

--Marshal Zeringue