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Jay’s Revised Modern Canon                               Modern American Literature 2022 Edition Jewish American History & Literature

                            Jewish American History

     Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews

     An Empire of Their Own: how the Jews Invented Hollywood, Neal Gabler

                            Jewish American Literature

     The Winds of War, War and Remembrance, The Hope, The Glory, Marjorie Morningstar, Herman Wouk

     The Origins of Totalitarianism, On Revolution, The Human Condition, Between Past and Future, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, The Life of the Mind, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Love and Saint Augustine, Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975, The Promise of Politics, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics Civil Disobedience On Violence and Thoughts on Politics and Revolution, The Recovery of the Public World, Responsibility and Judgment, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, Hannah Arendt

The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth, Ken Krimstein

Hannah Arendt, Julia Kristeva

      Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman

     The Five Books of Miriam: A Woman’s Commentary on the Torah, The Classic Tales: 4,000 Years of Jewish Lore, Jewish Spirit: Stories & Art, Ellen Frankel

     The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions, For the Love of God: The Bible as an Open Book, The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019, Dancing at the Devil’s Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics, and the Erotic, Alicia Suskin Ostriker

          Sages and Dreamers, A Passover Haggadah, Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends, Wise Men and Their Tales: Portraits of Biblical, Talmudic, and Hasidic Masters, All RIvers Run To The Sea: Memoir, Night Trilogy ( Night, Dawn, Day), The Trial of God: as it was held on February 25, 1649, in Shamgorod, A Beggar in Jerusalem, Elie Wiesel

Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom, Ariel Burger

      The Red Tent – 20th Anniversary Edition: A Novel, Day After Night, Anita Diamant

     The Chosen, The Promise, My Name is Asher Lev, The Gift of Asher Lev, Davita’s Harp, Chaim Potok

    The Shawl/Rosa, Envy, or Yiddish in America / The Pagan Rabbi, Collected Stories, The Messiah of Stockholm, The Puttermesser Papers, Antiquities, Heir to the Glimmering World, Foreign Bodies, Art & Ardor, Metaphor & Memory, Quarrel & Quandary: Essays, The Din in the Head, Critics Monsters Fanatics and Other Literary Essays, Portrait Of The Artist As A Bad Character: And Other Essays On Writing Cynthia Ozick

     The Rabbi of Lud, Boswell, George Mills, The Dick Gibson Show, Stanley Elkin

    Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, The March, World’s Fair, E.L. Doctorow

E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations) Harold Bloom

    Essays, Collected Stories, Grace Paley

    Gimpel the Fool and other stories, Shadows on the Hudson, In My Father’s Court, Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side (with Bruce Davidson),  The Spinoza of Market Street, A Friend of Kafka and other stories, A Crown of Feathers and other stories, The Family Moskat, Isaac Bashevis Singer

   Anarchy and other writings, Living My Life, Emma Goldman

      The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, Collected Stories, There Is Simply Too Much to Think about: Collected Nonfiction, Saul Bellow

Conversations with Saul Bellow, Saul Bellow (Editor), Gloria L. Cronin, Ben Siegel

The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune 1915-1964, The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005, Zachary Leader

   The Complete Stories, The Natural, The Assistant, The Fixer, Dubin’s Lives, Bernard Malamud

   The Ghost Writer, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, The Plot Against America, American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, Philip Roth

   Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story, I Was Here, The Weight of Ink, Rachel Kadish                

    Collected Poems, Alan Ginsberg

The Poem That Changed America: “Howl” Fifty Years Later, Jason Shinder ed   Man Walks into a Room, The History of Love, Great House, Forest Dark, Nicole Krauss

     A Guide for the Perplexed: a novel, Septimania: a novel, Jonathan Levi

     36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction, Properties of Light: A Novel of Love Betrayal and Quantum Physics, The Dark Sister, Strange Attractors: Stories, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, Rebecca Goldstein

     Kaddish, Leon Wieseltier

     Everything Is Illuminated, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Tree of Codes, Here I Am, Eating Animals, The Future Dictionary of America (Editor), New American Haggadah, Jonathan Safran Foer

     The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, The Final Solution, Summerland, Gentlemen of the Road, Telegraph Avenue, Moonglow, Manhood for Amateurs, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, Michael Chabon              

     Poems 1962-2020, American Originality: Essays on Poetry, Louise Glück

The Poetry of Louise Glück: A Thematic Introduction, Daniel Morris                          

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jayofdollhousepark

I am a former counselor, teacher, and debate coach who loves to read and write, and a student of literature, psychology, history, philosophy, and languages who loves to travel. Help me celebrate the lives and works of our great authors as a common human heritage. I can also be reached at jayofdollhousepark@gmail.com. Regarding my literary criticism on Dollhouse Park Conservatory and Imaginarium: My initial project was to celebrate the authors whose work I love on their birthdays, by reading something of theirs and writing an appreciation. I've now come full circle and completed the calendar year. These are the authors whose works have been my companions through life, and some new discoveries. Many of their books are ones I also taught in high school English classes; works thoroughly lived with. I also include reading lists by national literature, a Modern American Literature group of lists, and Best Books of the Year lists and reviews. There will occasionally be my own poetry as well; you are warned. I hope that you may also find books which will help you through life and bring depth and joy to your days. As to my aesthetics, I envision the mission of creating civilization as a game played by figures which represent conserving and revolutionary forces, as James Joyce and T.S. Eliot may serve as paragons of their sides of the board and reflect each other as partners in the great game of reimagining humankind, a result of the early influence of Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which I read during seventh grade, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I read the following year. Each of us, as with every author, musician, artist, scientist, or public figure, plays the Great Game on one of these dyadic teams. The function of conservatism is to buffer order from the shock of the new and withstand stresses and changing conditions without losing ourselves or undergoing morphogenic change, the loss of identity as structural form, or ruptures to our prochronism, the memory and history of our choices, successful adaptations and strategies of survival as expressed in our systemic form, the loss of our culture and traditions. The function of revolution and innovation is to capitalize on chaos as adaptive potential in dynamically unstable conditions, to adapt and shape ourselves to future needs and to transform, create, and discover new forms, meanings, and values. We need both conserving and revolutionary forces to envision and enact a thing of beauty, be it a person, story, song, film, theory, or any creative artifact of authentic human imagination and experience. A beautiful political structure may be judged by the same criterion as a beautiful poem; so also with humans and the values their actions embody. Thank you so much for your company on this journey. Regarding my daily political journal on Torch of Freedom, a voice of progressive democracy and the antifascist Resistance: I stand for liberty, equality, truth, and justice; a free society of equals. My America is a torch of Liberty and a beacon of hope to the world. I stand for the absolute structural and systemic equality of all human beings, and for the Rights of Man everywhere on earth. I am on the side of Prometheus; rebellion, chaos, anarchy, resistance, transgression, revolution, and the frightening of the horses. Herein I write as an agent of Chaos and Transformation whose goal in life is to become a fulcrum and change the balance of power in the world. For thirty-nine years now I have been engaged in antifascist action, democracy activism, and revolutionary struggle against tyranny and state terror for the liberation of humankind, wherever men hunger to be free. And so I offer to all of you the Oath of the Resistance as it was given to me in Beirut 1982 by the great Jean Genet as he formulated it in Paris 1940, in a burning house, in a lost cause, in a time of force and darkness, in a last stand and an act of defiance beyond hope of victory or survival; “We swear our loyalty to each other, who answer tyranny with Liberty and fascism with Equality. We shall resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows.” Resist and fear not, O my brothers and sisters, for in resistance we seize our freedom and become Unconquered.

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  1. Pingback: March 21 2023 On Poetic Vision as Reimagination and Transformation of Our Possibilities of Becoming Human – Torch of Liberty
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