WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

In his monumental new book, The Dream of a Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950-1492, internationally acclaimed poet and translator Peter Cole provides a window into one of the great periods in world literature.

In his debut collection of stories, Beware of God, Shalom Auslander imagined God through the eyes of a yeshiva student, a chimpanzee, two hamsters, and an advertising salesman. Now he turns the light on himself.

"The first time I had a sense of Jewishness as a desirable state," writes Adam Gopnik, "was when I was thirteen and, turned on to the idea of New York, saw that it was made up of Jewish comedians; of jokes."  Gopnik talks about growing up in the golden age of Jewish comedy -

In her new book, Jews and Power, Ruth Wisse explores the Jewish relationship to power from King David to the Oslo Accords to more recent confrontations between Israel and the Arab world. Wisse looks at how Jews have often tried to make a virtue out of powerlessness, while their enemies

Pulitzer Prize winning critic Michael Dirda explores the life and work of Isaac Babel.  Born in Odessa in 1894, Isaac Babel became a Soviet literary sensation in 1926 with the publication of his collection Red Cavalry, which drew on his experiences as a journalist in the Polish-Soviet

In his new book, Marc Chagall, Jonathan Wilson traces the painter's life from his impoverished youth in Belarus to the art schools of St. Petersburg to galleries of Paris and New York.

Sara Paretsky published her first story in The American Girl at the age of 11, but it wasn't until her 30s that she turned to detective fiction.