"Meister Singer," To Steal a Headline

From the Village Voice, no less...in a story from earlier this month which offers an interesting perspective on how today's Jewish American writers might be looking at the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer.

No one should cast Singer as the voice of naive tradition; he was a sophisticate... Rather than as a traditionalist—or even a modernist—Singer might best be considered in the company of the great postmodern magical-historical writers like Toni Morrison or Gabriel García Márquez. Singer's Frampols and Shidlovtzes are constructed along similar lines to Morrison's Bottom or Márquez's Macondo; the combination of realistic detail and fantastical subject matter re-creates and interrogates lost histories, reanimating a vanished world and undermining conventional understandings of that bygone place.

I've noted the centennial before, but you might want to take a look at a recent interview I conducted by email with Ilan Stavans, the editor of the three-volume Library of America edition of Singer's short stories. I haven't been able to do any more than glance at the stories yet, between maintaining this blog, doing work that gets me paid, and having a personal life, but I did enjoy an afternoon spent with Singer: An Album, a short illustrated biography with appreciations by authors like Jonathan Safran Foer and Cynthia Ozick as well as a literary roundtable discussion.