#temim fruchter

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Fiction Free-for-All Book Bracket Tournament: Round 1A

Choose a book:

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg

City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter

Voting ended onFeb 15, 2025

Book summaries below:

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg

Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, who is telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women, the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, offering good coffee, southern barbecue, and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder. And as the past unfolds, the present will never be quite the same again.

Southern literature, historical fiction, 1930s, adult

City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter

An ambitious, delirious novel that tangles with queerness, spirituality, and generational silence, City of Laughter announces Temim Fruchter as a fresh and assured new literary voice. The tale of a young queer woman stuck in a thicket of generational secrets, the novel follows her back to her family’s origins, where ancestral clues begin to reveal a lineage both haunted and shaped by desire.

Ropshitz, Poland, was once known as the City of Laughter. As this story opens, an 18th century badchan, a holy jester whose job is to make wedding guests laugh, receives a visitation from a mysterious stranger—bringing the laughter the people of Ropshitz desperately need, and triggering a sequence of events that will reverberate across the coming century.

In the present day, Shiva Margolin, recovering from the heartbreak of her first big queer love and grieving the death of her beloved father, struggles to connect with her guarded mother, who spends most of her time at the local funeral home. A student of Jewish folklore, Shiva seizes an opportunity to visit Poland, hoping her family’s mysteries will make more sense if she walks in the footsteps of her great-grandmother Mira, about whom no one speaks.

What she finds will make her question not only her past and her future, but also her present. Electric and sharply intimate, City of Laughter zigzags between our universe and a tapestry of real and invented Jewish folklore, asking how far we can travel from the stories that have raised us without leaving them behind.

Literary fiction, contemporary, historical fiction, folklore, magical realism, adult

[lgbtqreads]

Happy Jewish American Heritage Month 2024!

Happy Jewish American Heritage Month! As always, we’re celebrating with books! For even more recs, check out previous years’ posts! Middle Grade Just Shy of Ordinary by A.J. Sass Thirteen-year-old Shai is an expert problem-solver. There’s never been something they couldn’t research and figure out on their own. But there’s one thing Shai hasn’t been able to logic their way through: picking at the…

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[theoffingmag]

You weren’t a threat to them.

You weren’t a threat to anyone, really. You just seemed unafraid, and, in your world, unfear was scarce, a superpower.

— Temim Fruchter, "Like Kings"

[bookcoversonly]

Title: City of Laughter | Author: Temim Fruchter | Publisher: Grove Press (2024)

[kamreadsandrecs]

Temim Fruchter on Writing to Resist Repression

Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they hav

[kammartinez]

Temim Fruchter on Writing to Resist Repression

Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they hav

[kammartinez]

Temim Fruchter on Learning to Break the Rules

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highli

[kamreadsandrecs]

Temim Fruchter on Learning to Break the Rules

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highli