"Let us now praise satirical Jews. It's a noble tradition that includes such luminaries as Groucho Marx, Fran Lebowitz and Jon Stewart, outsiders who mock society with a surgical scalpel of wit to reveal the ridiculous in sharp relief. To that illustrious group some may consider adding writer Shalom Auslander. In his debut collection of short stories, Beware of God, Auslander takes his knife to the pious veneer of modern-day religious Jewish life and makes sport of exposing its underbelly. For the Gen-X and Gen-Y Jews who wear 'Moses Is My Homeboy' T-shirts and read Heeb magazine, a poet laureate may be in the making."
Ruth Andrew Ellison reviewed Shalom Auslander's debut story collection, Beware of God, in the L. A. Times in 2005. Read more.
Auslander visits the Institute tomorrow, Thursday, 3/1.
"[Shalom Auslander] is scabrously funny, especially on faith and meaning, but his stories have a habit of breaking down. This is partly because his great subject, God's capriciousness, is a closed loop and as such can be difficult to frame as narrative. 'Pascal's last words were: May God never abandon me,' he observes early in the novel. 'A moment later, God did.' In such a universe, it's not that bad things happen to good people, but that everything that happens is ultimately defined by its own meaninglessness, by the futility of being alive."
Read more of David Ulin's review in the L. A. Times.
Shalom Auslander visits the Writers Institute on March 1st.