I took this week off for the Jewish New Year, and will be back next week. In the meantime, I am delighted to let you know that the first chapter of a novella-in-verse I'm writing has now appeared at the Jewish Review of Books. It's a Gen X narrative poem, set in the 1980s in … Continue reading A slightly off-topic notice to my readers
Month: September 2022
Happy New Year
!שנה טובה Wishing all my readers a year of health, blessings, and good books. Dave Trampier, 1977.
The Lilith of Charles Williams
In my last post, I remarked on how unsettling it is to find that the societal warnings and critiques posed in fantasy guise by George MacDonald in his 1895 novel Lilith have in our own day taken on real-life forms that might make any demon proud. Charles Williams’s metaphysical horror novel Descent Into Hell (1937) … Continue reading The Lilith of Charles Williams
The Lilith of George MacDonald
1. In C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, we learn that the White Witch is a descendant of "Adam’s first wife . . . Lilith.” The certain influence on Lewis in this suggestive genealogy was his beloved George MacDonald, whose novel Lilith first appeared in 1895 and was part of a … Continue reading The Lilith of George MacDonald
Anatole France, “La Fille de Lilith” (1889)
It should not be surprising that Lilith, the demoness from medieval Jewish folklore and mysticism and with earlier roots in rabbinic texts and near eastern mythology, would come into wide circulation in nineteenth century European art and literature. Her oriental ambience, occult cachet, and symbolic relevance for modernity’s anxious grappling with the nature and shifting … Continue reading Anatole France, “La Fille de Lilith” (1889)
investigations and fantasies 