User:Mitchmar
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Steve Stern was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1947, the son of a grocer. He left Memphis in the sixties to attend college, then to travel the US and Europe - living, as he told one interviewer, "the wayward life of my generation for about a decade," and ending on a hippie commune in the Ozarks. He went on to study writing in the graduate program at the University of Arkansas, then lived in London before returning to Memphis in his thirties to accept a job at a local folklore center. There he learned about the city's old Jewish ghetto, The Pinch, and began to steep himself in Yiddish folklore. He published his first book, the story collection Isaac and the Undertaker's Daughter, which was based in The Pinch, in 1983. It won the Pushcart Writers' Choice Award and acclaim from some notable critics, including Susan Sontag, who praised the book's "brio ... whiplash sentences ... energy and charm," and observed that "Steve Stern may be a late practitioner of the genre" of Yiddish folklore, "but he is an expert one." By decade's end Stern had won the O. Henry award, published more collections, including Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, and the novel Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground, and was being hailed by critics such as Cynthia Ozick as the successor to Isaac Bashevis Singer. His 2000 collection The Wedding Jester won the National Jewish Book Award, and his novel The Angel of Forgetfulness was named one of the best books of 2005 by The Washington Post. Stern currently lives in Balston Spa, New York, and teaches at Skidmore College.
Stern's latest work, the novella The North of God (Melville House) launched on May 29th.
[edit] Interviews and Articles
'Journeying to the Other Side'
'The Angel of Forgetfulness' (washingtonpost.com)
