Acclaimed writer to speak at JCC on May 17

Anyone interested in meeting someone who is very hot in New York literary circles will want to attend a bagel brunch with author Boris Fishman on May 17 in Providence.

Fishman will discuss his books, “A Replacement Life,” which the New York Times named as one of the 100 Notable Books of 2014, and “Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo,” which made the newspaper’s list of 100 Notable Books of 2016.

Fishman was born in Minsk, Belarus, and immigrated to the United States in 1988, at the age of 9. His journalism, essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Book Review, The New Republic, The Nation, The London Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian, and in Jewish publications, including Tablet, The Forward and The Jerusalem Report.

Fishman’s debut novel, “A Replacement Life,” has won several literary prizes. Donald Weber, a reviewer for the Jewish Book Council, says that in the novel, “we enter a richly comic world of aging Russian Jewish immigrants, still fierce in their will to survive after so much misery wrought by Hitler and Stalin, and their spiritually lost new world grandchildren ....”

His second novel, “Don’t Let My Baby Do Rodeo,” is about the mystery of inheritance and what exactly it means to belong, and has received raves from O, the Oprah Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, National Public Radio and others. In the book, a New Jersey couple adopts a boy from Montana who turns out to be wild. Searching for answers, the couple embarks on a road trip to track down their son’s birth parents.

Fishman received a degree in Russian literature from Princeton University. Afterward, he was on the editorial staff of The New Yorker, and edited “Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier,” an anthology of stories set in the ruins of the Soviet empire. He received his MFA in fiction from New York University and now teaches in Princeton’s Creative Writing Program. He is at work on his next book, a work of creative nonfiction about food.

Fishman will be introduced by Robin Kall, the “fairy book mother” behind Reading with Robin and the Point Street Reading Series, at the bagel brunch at the Dwares Jewish Community Center, 401 Elmgrove Ave., Providence, on Wednesday, May 17, at 9 a.m.

Fishman’s books will be available for purchase, and bagels and pastries will be served. The cost is $3 for members of the Dwares JCC and Temple Beth-El, $5 for all others. This fee may be applied towards book purchases.  Registration is required, at www.jewishallianceri.org/novel-conversations-boris-fishman or by contacting Lynne Bell at the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island, 401-421-4111, ext. 100. The event is sponsored by the Jewish Alliance, Reading with Robin and Temple Beth-El.

LARRY KATZ is director of Jewish Life and Learning at the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island.