Harold Bloom | The New York Review of Books

An Open Letter to Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, and Donald Tusk, President of the European Council

March 21, 2019 issue

The Grand Comedian Visits the Bible

Cain

by José Saramago, translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa

February 23, 2012 issue

My Favorite Book in the Bible

It may seem frivolous to speak of a favorite book in the Bible but mine is Jonah, by far. A sly masterpiece of four brief chapters, Jonah reverberates in Herman Melville’s *Moby-Dick,* where it is the text for Father Mapple’s grand sermon. Tucked away in the Book of the Twelve, with such fierce prophets as Amos and Micah, Jonah is out of place. It should be with the Writings—Song of Songs, Job, Koheleth—because it too is a literary sublimity, almost the archetypal parable masking as short story.

July 28, 2011

Revisiting Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Magician of Lublin

by Isaac Bashevis Singer, translated from the Yiddish by Elaine Gottlieb and Joseph Singer

October 28, 2010 issue

Bashevis Revisited

*Der Kuntsenmakher fun Lublin* perhaps should have been entitled *The Trickster of Lublin* when first it was published in English a half-century ago. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s second novel established his American audience, which grew until his death at eighty-seven in 1991. Rereading it now in Yiddish and in English (the novel has just been reissued in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of its publication) has been a mixed experience. The book set the formula for all his narratives long or short. They are prurient sagas of the flesh and of repentance, marked by the ambivalences of a vegetarian satyr.

September 20, 2010