on Jews and Fantasy Literature
Journey of Tapiola (1938)Tapiola’s Brave Regiment (1941)Winter in April (1938)Poems: A Winter Tide (1940) Beginning in 1933 with his novel One More Spring, Robert Nathan began publishing with Knopf, which also brought out new editions of his earlier books. Like its competitor Random House, the Knopf house was an instance of new Jewish involvement in … Continue reading Robert Nathan Readthrough: The Gathering Storm
On Michael Moorcock 1. Michael Moorcock is one of the genuine titans of fantasy literature. He has written around 100 books so far—reformatting and new editions make a precise count difficult—and these run an astonishing gamut from sword and sorcery tales to surrealist science fiction to epic refractions of twentieth-century political barbarity to deconstructions of … Continue reading The Scream of a Young Man
After Road of Ages, his 1935—and, sadly, now timely—allegorical fantasy about the Jewish need for a haven from global antisemitism, Robert Nathan’s next novel is a less ambitious, more consistently whimsical little tale about an impractical dreamer who gets the chance to live his dream. Hector Pecket, the protagonist of Nathan’s 1936 The Enchanted Voyage, … Continue reading Robert Nathan Readthrough: The Enchanted Voyage (1936)
(Note: This is the latest in my series of posts on the works of Robert Nathan. If you want to read more, the first is here.) “The Jews were going into exile,” begins Robert Nathan’s 1935 quasi-fantastical novel Road of Ages. Having been “driven from all the countries of the world,” the Jews make their … Continue reading Robert Nathan Readthrough: Road of Ages (1935)
One More Spring was Robert Nathan’s first breakout success. The novel spent twelve weeks on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list, and was later included in Life magazine’s list (selected by Henry Seidel Canby) of the best one hundred books published from 1924 to 1944. There were reports that Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II would … Continue reading Robert Nathan Readthrough: One More Spring (1933)
The Orchid is not one of Robert Nathan’s fantastical novels, though it is another of his ironic moral entertainments. Set in Nathan’s fairytale-like New York City, its two main themes have been seen in several of his earlier novels: marriage and art. Rather than presenting these as binary opposites in a simple choice between commitment … Continue reading Robert Nathan Readthrough: The Orchid (1931)
Readers of Commentary magazine in the 1950s were treated to a series of finely observed vignettes about life in Israel, written by an American Jew who had emigrated (so an editor’s note informs us) to the young Jewish state. The author published half a dozen columns in the magazine, portraying a gallery of Israel’s immigrants, … Continue reading The Alchemist
Up to Eleven “Shiel is probably a kind of genius,” wrote Eudora Welty in the New York Times in 1944, reviewing an anthology of Weird fiction edited by August Derleth.[1] Unlike other authors included in Derleth’s volume, such as H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Robert Bloch, however, the literary career of Matthew Phipps … Continue reading The Lord of the Sea: M. P. Shiel’s Fantasia on the Jewish Question
In the early 1980s, fantasy role-playing games became a theme in the fantasy literature that had exercised such an overwhelming influence on those games. This development went hand in hand with the games’ growing popularity—above all Dungeons & Dragons, whose parent company TSR released its new Basic Set in 1981. The pioneer in writing D&D-related … Continue reading A Guardian of the Flame
Robert Nathan's There Is Another Heaven is a fantasy of the afterlife, a category that includes C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, Peter S. Beagle’s A Fine and Private Place, and the Israeli fantasy writer Ofir Touché Gafla’s The World of the End. At the start of Nathan's novel, three new arrivals find themselves approaching … Continue reading Robert Nathan Readthrough: There Is Another Heaven (1929)
investigations and fantasies 