Readercon Schedule June 24, 2011 – Posted in: Aberrant Normalcy

Besides the Naked City reading in Cambridge, MA on July 14th (just before Readercon) which I already mentioned, I’ll be on this panel*:

8:00 PM G    Dybbuks, Golems, Demons, Oy Vey!: Jewish Mythology & Folklore in Speculative Fiction. Steve Berman, Barbara Krasnoff, Matthew Kressel (leader), Shira Lipkin, Faye Ringel. From Rabbi Loew’s golem of Prague to Peter Beagle’s dybbuk of Brooklyn, the literature of Jewish supernatural and fantastic has been a long and rich one. In Jane Yolen’s The Devil’s Arithmetic and Lisa Goldstein’s The Red Magician, the authors use magic and myth to comment on the horrors of the Holocaust and the meaning of tradition. In Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, in alternate-history Alaska, a heroin junkie might be the long-awaited Messiah. We’ll discuss the stories of Rachel Pollack, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Lavie Tidhar, Neil Gaiman, Sonya Taaffe and other writers of Jewish-themed fiction. What is it about Jewish stories of demons, golems, dybbuks and angels, many of them non-canonical, that appeals to writers of speculative fiction? What obscure Jewish myths, like the gargantuan bird Ziz or the miniscule stone-cutting worm Shamir, have yet to be mined (pun intended)?

I’m looking for suggestions/names of Jewish-themed SF stories or Jewish SF authors that might add to the discussion above.  Please feel free to suggest some.  Thank you!

* I may also be participating in additional readings.  Schedule tba.