fiction Archives - Over The River PR

Coming May 17, 2022

From the Award-Winning Author of Rashi’s Daughters and 50 Shades of Talmud

Comes a Powerful Romance with a Purpose

The Choice: A Novel of Love, Faith, and the Talmud
by Maggie Anton, author of Rashi’s Daughters, Banot Press, ISBN: 978-0-9763050-3-3, $16.99

It’s Brooklyn, New York, and the year is 1955. Dr. Robert Salk discovers a vaccine for polio. The Dodgers play the Yankees in the World Series. The McCarthy hearings deport communists while the new state of Israel takes shape in the Middle East. Young Rabbi Nathan Mandel hears a knock at the door.

Expecting journalist H. M. Covey, he is shocked to find attractive Hannah Eisin on the other side. Hannah reveals that Covey was her birth name before her father died and her mother married Samuel Eisin. She uses an ambiguous byline because she’s writing for a Yiddish newspaper where female columnists are rare.

After the interview, Hannah convinces Rabbi Mandel to teach her Talmud, something forbidden by Jewish law that could cost him his job if discovered. Things start innocently enough, but soon the gloves come off as “Annie” and “Nate” discover they are passionate about much more than Talmud.

Maggie Anton has written a powerful love story with a purpose: to expose the many ways the Torah and Talmud have been interpreted unfavorably toward women. Anton is fearless in the subjects her characters tackle during their weekly sessions:

Niddah & Mikveh. Rules regarding sex and menstruation.

The Minyan & The Drash. Why Jewish women are excluded from services.

The Shanda of Mesirah. A rabbi refuses to turn a pedophile over to police.

Anyone interested in the role of women in Judaism will find Maggie Anton’s The Choice an unforgettable story that sets the record straight!

ABOUT MAGGIE ANTON:

Maggie Anton is an award-winning author of both fiction and nonfiction and a Talmud scholar with a deep understanding of Jewish women’s history. Her research into the great Jewish scholar Rashi, who had no sons, led to the award-winning trilogy Rashi’s Daughters, followed by a two-book series, Rav Hisda’s Daughter, a National Jewish Book Award finalist and a Library Journal pick for Best Historical Fiction. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

ADAVANCE PRAISE FOR THE CHOICE:

“Maggie Anton gives evocative voice to the generation of our mothers, whose questions and bold solutions, especially about the most intimate of subjects, laid the foundation for the contemporary transformation of women’s status in Jewish learning and law.” —Rabbi Susan Grossman, DHL, Senior Rabbi, Beth Shalom Congregation, Columbia, Maryland, and coeditor of Daughters of the King

“The Choice takes us into the Jewish world of love and learning and the love of learning. One can only be grateful for such an intriguing and engaging work. Maggie Anton’s combination of history, imagination, and feminist reading of classical Jewish texts is impressive.” —Rabbi Laura Geller, Rabbi Emerita, Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills, and coauthor of Getting Good at Getting Older

“Maggie Anton utilizes her characters’ authentic voices to address social justice while still entertaining the reader with an engaging romance.” —Jackie Ben-Efraim, Special Collections Librarian, American Jewish University

“Maggie Anton’s new novel embeds issues concerning the intersection of modernity, belief, and ritual practices within a lively, intellectually engaging romance. . . . Best of all, the romantic relationship of Hannah and Nathan evolves in sync with their scintillating discussions of various Talmudic passages, from both traditional and critical perspectives, leaving us wondering just how much more enriched Jewish life would be today had women been participants in the Talmudic dialectic all along.” —Stuart S. Miller, Professor of Hebrew History and Judaic Studies, University of Connecticut at Storrs, and author of At the Intersection of Texts and Material Finds

WHAT THEY’RE SAYING ABOUT MAGGIE ANTON’S NOVELS:

“True to her mission as a historical novelist, Maggie Anton offers a woman’s take on what has been a mostly male enterprise.” —Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Jewish Journal

“Maggie Anton demonstrates just how sex-positive Judaism is.” —Rabbi Elliot Dorff, Rector and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, American Jewish University

“Anton delivers a tour de force . . . [Readers] will fly through the pages and come away wishing for more.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“A compelling combination of drama, suspense, and romance.”—Lilith magazine

For further information, review copy requests, or to schedule an interview with Maggie Anton, please contact Rachel Tarlow Gul at Over the River Public Relations: rachel@otrpr.com.

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The Easy Life in Kamusari by Shion Miura Translated into English by Juliet Winters Carpenter

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Rachel Tarlow Gul, Rachel@otrpr.com

From Shion Miura, the award-winning author of The Great Passage, comes a rapturous novel where the contemporary and the traditional meet amid the splendor of Japan’s mountain way of life.

“Fans of all ages should enjoy the author’s blend of the traditional and the contemporary.” Kirkus Reviews

“Shion Miura, award-winning and world renown Japanese author of The Great Passage (2011), delivers yet another fascinating introspection into how the ancient and traditional worlds meet the modern and contemporary way of life in The Easy Life in Kamusari (2021) – the first book in Miura’s new Forest series. Translated into English by superb veteran translator, Juliet Winters Carpenter, this upcoming novel…unravels into a beautiful coming-of-age tale that makes the reader long for a greener life – one without phones, the internet, and where sentences end in ‘naa-naa.’” Asia Media International

Just in time for the holiday season comes, THE EASY LIFE IN KAMUSARI, an uplifting and absorbing story that is both simply told and full of beauty and depth. Written by the award-winning Japanese author, Shion Miura and translated into English for the first time by Juliet Winters Carpenter, one of the foremost translators of Japanese literature, the novel will be out November 2^nd from Amazon Crossing.

The narrator of the novel, Yuki Hirano, is just out of high school when his parents enroll him, against his will, in a forestry training program in the remote mountain village of Kamusari. No phone, no internet, no shopping. Just a small, inviting community where the most common expression is “take it easy.”

At first, Yuki is exhausted, fumbles with the tools, asks silly questions, and feels like an outcast. Kamusari is the last place a city boy from Yokohama wants to spend a year of his life. But as resistant as he might be, the scent of the cedars and the staggering beauty of the region have a pull.

Yuki learns to fell trees and plant saplings. He begins to embrace local festivals, he’s mesmerized by legends of the mountain, and he might be falling in love. In learning to respect the forest on Mt. Kamusari for its majestic qualities and its inexplicable secrets, Yuki starts to appreciate Kamusari’s harmony with nature and its ancient traditions.

In this warm and lively coming-of-age story, Miura transports us from the trappings of city life to the trials, mysteries, and delights of a mythical mountain forest.

For further information and review copy requests, please contact Rachel Tarlow Gul at Over the River Public Relations: rachel@otrpr.com.

THE EASY LIFE IN KAMUSARI

By Shion Miura

Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter

Amazon Crossing; November 2, 2021

Literary Fiction | 208 pp. | Paperback: $14.95, ISBN#: 978-1542027168;

Kindle: $4.99, ISBN#: 978-1542027144

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September 2021 Virtual Tour for Bestselling Author Trisha Thomas’ New Historical Fiction, WHAT PASSES AS LOVE

We’re excited to announce this terrific lineup of bloggers who will join us in celebrating the release of Trisha Thomas’ new historical novel, WHAT PASSES AS LOVE! This heartrending and breathtaking novel is about a young woman who pays a devastating price for freedom. We hope you will follow along as we share reviews, features, Q&A, excerpts, and book giveaways.

“Thomas’ well-researched and compelling novel charts Dahlia’s complex journey of escape, reinvention and self-acceptance. Fans of Alena Dillon and Lucinda Riley will be moved by this historical glimpse into a brutal time period. Not shying away from the cruelties of slavery, Thomas gives a voice to the enslaved by exploring the power of shared humanity and newfound courage.” – Booklist

“The author really gets inside Dahlia’s head, creating a protagonist who knows how to make the best of a bad situation and who constantly puzzles over the enigma of being neither Black nor white, a girl caught in the middle. She’s resourceful, a chance-taker who dreams and schemes until opportunities present themselves. It’s impossible not to root for her, however risky her actions.” – Historical Novel Society

Wednesday, September 1: OYNIDA LOVES BOOKS, IT’S A BOOKISH WORLD, HEY THAT’S JAZ

Thursday, September 2: BOOK GIRL MAGIC

Friday, September 3: NURSE BOOKIE

Tuesday, September 7: BLACK, BIRACIAL AND BOOKISH, ALWAYS WITH A BOOK/K2 READER

Wednesday, September 8: DAI 2 DAI READER, THIS BROWN GIRL READS

Thursday, September 9: ARMED WITH A BOOK, READING WITH GLAMOUR

Friday, September 10: TRAVEL WITH A BOOK

Sunday, September 12: COCO CHASING ADVENTURES

Monday, September 13: MOMMA LEIGH ELLEN’S BOOK NOOK

Tuesday, September 14: LITERARY QUICKSAND, SUZY APPROVED BOOK REVIEWS

Wednesday, September 15: BLISS AND BOOKS

Thursday, September 16: BOOKS, LOVE AND UNDERSTANDING

Friday, September 17: WHAT’S BETTER THAN BOOKS

Monday, September 20: READER THEN BLOGGER. KIM READS AND READS

Tuesday, September 21: TARHEEL READER

Wednesday, September 22: JYPSY LYNN, SECRET READING LIFE

Thursday, September 23: BOOKAPOTAMUS

Friday, September 24: SOME KIND OF A LIBRARY

Monday, September 27: SHE JUST LOVES BOOKS

Tuesday, September 28: WE LOVE BIG BOOKS AND WE CANNOT LIE

Wednesday, September 29: READING MAMA REVIEWS

Thursday, September 30: TORI LOVING WORDS

Friday, October 1: BOOKS EN VOGUE

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August 2021 Virtual Book Tour for TWO SPIES IN CARACAS by Moisés Naím, translated into English by Daniel Hahn

Release date: August 1, 2021, Amazon Crossing

A “gripping political thriller that immerses the reader in the volatile Bolivarian revolution led by Venezuelan army colonel Hugo Chávez…This is a must for anyone who wants to explore this tumultuous and often strange period in modern Latin American history.” – Publishers Weekly

Mark your calendars for this fantastic virtual book tour for TWO SPIES IN CARACAS by Moisés Naím and translated into English by the talented Daniel Hahn.

Moisés Naím has been called “one of the world’s leading thinkers” (Prospect Magazine) and is one of today’s most widely read columnists on international economics and geopolitics. In the early 1990s, he served as Venezuela’s Minister of Trade and Industry, as director of Venezuela’s Central Bank, and as executive director of the World Bank. He is a Distinguished Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC and a best-selling author of 14 nonfiction books, including the New York Times bestseller The End of Power, which was selected by the Washington Post and the Financial Times as one of the best books of 2013. Naím’s background and extensive knowledge of the rise and fall of Venezuela in the 21^st century offer the perfect foundation for his debut novel.

SYNOPSIS:

TWO SPIES IN CARACAS is the best combination of historical fiction, spy thriller and romance set against the passions and betrayals of Hugo Chavez’s revolution. Although fiction, the story is inspired by more than two decades of research, as well as Naím’s direct access to the best-informed sources about what happened in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela. The result is a captivating page turner based on unimaginable real-life events.

Venezuela, 1992. Unknown colonel Hugo Chávez stages an ill-fated coup against a government, igniting the passions of Venezuela’s poor and catapulting the oil-rich country to international attention. For two rival spies hurriedly dispatched to Caracas—one from Washington, DC, and the other from Fidel Castro’s Cuba—this is a career-defining mission.

Smooth-talking Iván Rincón of Cuba’s Intelligence Directorate needs a rebel ally to secure the future of his own country. His job: support Chávez and the revolution by rallying the militants and neutralizing any opposing agents.

Meanwhile, the CIA’s Cristina Garza will do everything in her power to cut Chávez’s influence short. Her priority: control the greatest oil reserves on the planet by ferreting out and eliminating Cuba’s principal operative.

As Chávez surges to power, Iván and Cristina are caught in the fallout of a toxic political time bomb: an intrepid female reporter and unwitting informant, a drug lord and key architect in Chávez’s rise, and personal entanglements between the spies themselves. With everything at stake, the adversaries find themselves at the center of a game of espionage, seduction, murder, and shifting alliances playing out against the precarious backdrop of a nation in free fall.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Moisés Naím is an internationally syndicated columnist and the host and producer of Efecto Naím, an Emmy winning weekly television program on international affairs that has been aired throughout the Americas since 2012 via NTN24/DirecTV. Naím was the editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine for 14 years and is the author of many scholarly articles and 15 books on international economics and politics. In 2011, he received the Ortega y Gasset prize, the most prestigious award for journalism in the Spanish language. His 2013 book, “The End of Power”, a New York Times bestseller, was selected by the Washington Post and the Financial Times as one of the best books of the year. In the early 1990s, Naím served as Venezuela’s Minister of Trade and Industry, as director of Venezuela’s Central Bank, and as executive director of the World Bank. He was previously professor of business and economics and dean of IESA, Venezuela’s leading business school. Dr. Naím holds MSc and PhD degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lives in Washington, DC. For more information visit https://www.moisesnaim.com/.

ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR:

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor, and translator with nearly seventy books to his name. He chaired the Translators Association for two years and served four years as a director of the British Centre for Literary Translation and four years as editor of the journal In Other Words. Recent translations include Juan Pablo Villalobos’s I Don’t Expect Anyone to Believe Me, Julián Fuks’s Resistance, and Carola Saavedra’s Blue Flowers. For more information, visit www.danielhahn.co.uk.

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Fall Blog Tour for Jerusalem As A Second Language by Rochelle Distelheim

Release date: September 29, 2020

JERUSALEM AS A SECOND LANGUAGE (Aubade Publishing) is the last book written by Rochelle Distelheim, who passed away in June 2020 at the age of 92. Foreword Reviews calls the novel “absorbing” and describes the author as “incisive, funny, and poetic in approaching questions of religious practice and resistance.”

Synopsis: It is 1998. The old Soviet Union is dead, and the new Russia is awash in corruption and despair. Manya and Yuri Zalinikov, secular Jews — he, a gifted mathematician recently dismissed from the Academy; she, a talented concert pianist — sell black market electronics in a market stall, until threatened with a gun by a mafioso in search of protection money. Yuri sinks into a Chekhovian melancholy, emerging to announce that he wants to “live as a Jew” in Israel. Manya and their daughter, Galina, are desolate, asking, “How does one do that, and why?”

And thus begins their odyssey — part tragedy, part comedy, always surprising. Struggling against loneliness, language, and danger, in a place Manya calls “more cousin’s club than country,” Yuri finds a Talmudic teacher equally addicted to religion and luxury; Manya finds a job playing the piano at The White Nights supper club, owned by a wealthy, flamboyant Russian with a murky history, who offers lust disguised as love. Galina, enrolled at Hebrew University, finds dance clubs and pizza emporiums and a string of young men, one of whom Manya hopes will save her from the Israeli Army by marrying her.

Against a potpourri of marriage wigs, matchmaking television shows, disastrous investment schemes, and a suicide bombing, the Zalinikovs confront the thin line between religious faith and skepticism, as they try to answer: What does it mean to be fully human, what does it mean to be Jewish? And what role in all of this does the mazel gene play?

About the Author: Rochelle Distelheim, a Chicago native, earned numerous short story literary awards, including The Katherine Anne Porter Prize; Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and Fellowships; The Ragdale Foundation Fellowships; The Faulkner Society Gold Medal in Novel-in-Progress; The Faulkner Society Gold Medal in Novel; The Gival Press 2017 Short Story Competition; Finalist, Glimmer Train’s Emerging Writers; and The Salamander Second Prize in Short Story. In addition, Rochelle’s short stories earned nominations for The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. Her stories have appeared in national magazines such as Glamour, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal, Woman’s Day, Woman’s World, Working Woman, Working Mother, and more. Her first novel, Sadie in Love, was published in 2018 when she was 90 years old. She lived in Highland Park, IL.

Praise for the Novel:

“Jerusalem as a Second Language tells a necessary story that I’m surprised hasn’t been told for American readers before. With wit and complexity, Rochelle Distelheim takes on two cultures whose differences are daunting and she manages to represent both with convincing detail and, most importantly, with sympathy. Her book builds a bridge over a deep chasm that her characters walk across with dignity and just enough mordant humor to convince us they’re real.” –Rosellen Brown, author of The Lake on Fire, Before and After, Tender Mercies, and Civil Wars

“Meet Manya, who grudgingly trades Russia for Israel. Shimmering with wit and bittersweet insights, Rochelle Distelheim’s Jerusalem as a Second Language is an emotional travelogue that begs the question, how does a secular Jew find her place in the world?” –Sally Koslow, author of Another Side of Paradise and the international bestseller, The Late, Lamented Molly Marx

“Quick on the heels of her smart, charming, and deeply humane novel Sadie in Love (2018), Rochelle Distelheim’s Jerusalem as a Second Language introduces her devoted readers to a whole new cast of displaced characters. As secular Jews who have fled to Jerusalem from an increasingly corrupt and dangerous Russia, the Zalinikov family struggles against displacement, loneliness, and danger in a country that is as strange to them as it is compelling. Simultaneously tender and steely-eyed, often funny, and occasionally sorrowful, Distelheim’s elegant prose plucks at the heart of what it means to be a family at odds with their new country, and with each other.” –Elizabeth Wetmore, author of Valentine

Blog Tour Schedule:

September 29th – Read with Me 702

September 30th – Grace J Reviewer Lady

October 1st – The Book Decoder

October 2nd – Jessica Belmont

October 5th – Suzy Approved Book Reviews

October 6th – Long and Short Reviews

October 7th – Storeybook Reviews

October 8th – Jennifer Tar Heel Reader

October 9th – Celtic Lady’s Reviews

October 12th – Collector of Book Boyfriends

October 13th – Beth’s Book Nook Blog