Modern Jewish Literature and Culture

The stories in John J. Clayton's newest collection are luminous, expressing a struggle to see growth and meaning in life as much as possible. Nearly all focus on family, and the characters, most of them Jewish, grapple with questions of living, dying, loving, and worshipping. Clayton has published several novels, including Mitzvah Man (TTUP, 2011), but he is best known for his critically-acclaimed short fiction, which has been included in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His collection Radiance was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Written after his collection Wrestling with Angels (2007), the ten stories in Many Seconds into the Future first appeared in Commentary and various other literary magazines, while some are appearing here for the first time. Often humorous, they are masterful stories of spiritual questing and emotional complexity.

Mourning the death of his wife after a senseless and tragic accident, Boston businessman Adam Friedman finds solace through living the mitzvot-instructions for goodness, justice, and compassion. In a frenzy of good deeds, he saves lives and helps the needy. Even his adolescent daughter, whose grief is as intense as his own, begins to wonder if there isn't more than a shared joke to the superhero T-shirt she has designed for him. When a thwarted crime and a supplicant's good fortune propel Friedman into the headlines, followers gather unbidden on his doorstep. Voices, dreams, and auras visit him. Miracles occur among family, friends, and strangers alike. But while some hail the Mitzvah Man as a modern-day prophet, others brand him a madman in danger of losing custody of his only child. Is he crazy? Is he holy? Through his experiences of love and loss, beauty and pain, language and custom, Friedman's daily quest reveals the unexpected ways in which God may inhabit us all.

Twelve-year-old Sarah Stein loves life in New York. Who wouldn't, growing up in a cool TriBeCa loft with an artist dad and a chocolate-maker mom, rollerblading in Central Park, hanging out with friends? That is, until the day her parents tell her they're divorcing. Forced to shuttle each day by bicycle between their separate residences on either side of the Brooklyn Bridge, Sarah soon discovers that the parents she thought she knew are as opposite as their new homes. She takes on a bizarrely split identity-one day she's the daughter of the prim, social-climbing chocolatier, the next the streetwise, smart-aleck child of the downtown abstract painter. Sarah Stein becomes a stranger to herself. But that's not the only thing that's strange. Colliding with the cart of a homeless man one day while pedaling across the bridge, Sarah tumbles through a magical portal and into an upside-down world of double identities and second chances. Through her friendship with the homeless Clarence Wind, a disgraced fireman missing since 9/11, and the love of her grandmother, a wise Holocaust survivor with her own hidden past, Sarah unlocks the mysteries behind the strangeness that she and Clarence share. In this witty, wonder-filled novel about broken homes and disconnected lives, with the majestic Brooklyn Bridge as backdrop and the legacies of the Holocaust and the Twin Towers as backstory, Sarah Stein's adventures prove both heartbreaking and heartwarming, an enchantment for readers of all ages.

The American Sun & Wind Moving Picture Company is an enchanting tale set in the silent film era. Beginning in 1915, in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where a Jewish family makes one and two reel silent films, the novel is composed of six chapters, each a discrete silent film in itself. Joey, the too-beautiful-to-be-a-boy son of moviemaker, Simon, and his actress wife, Hannah, imagines stories that his uncle's camera turns into scenes for their movies. Witness to and participant in the rapid technological advances in film, from the movies his family makes, to the advent of the talkies, Joey is cast in both male and female roles, onstage and off. When the woman Joey loves murders her abusive husband and sends Joey from his New Jersey family disguised as the mother of her own children, he embarks on a cross-country journey of adventure and hardship, crossing paths with the likes of D. W. Griffith, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, and "Roxy" Rothafel. Finally, reunited on the opposite coast with his uncle, and with the woman he has never stopped loving, Joey's wild journey-and life!-arrive at a moment as unpredictable as it is magical. In an outrageously original tale worthy of a studio whose moguls might have been Kafka, Garcia Marquez, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, reality and illusion merge and separate, leaving the audience spellbound even after the final curtain falls.