Abraham's Perlow topic: interconnections between literature, religion

Author Pearl Abraham will discuss "Orthodoxy: The End of Prophecy," a lecture on the interconnection of religion and literature, when she delivers the spring Jacob Pelow Lecture at Skidmore. Free and open to the public, the talk is scheduled at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 5, in Davis Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.

Abraham is the author of The Seventh Beggar, a finalist for the 2006 Koret Award in Fiction. The Romance Reader, her first novel, a finalist for the Discover New Writer's Award, was named "Best Book of 1995" by Library Journal, and was selected as first title by the Contra Costa Times of San Francisco. It also was on best-seller lists in Germany and The Netherlands.

About Giving Up America, her second novel, one critic wrote "In spare prose, with painstaking attention to quotidian detail, the book magnifies the anticlimactic dissipation of love and unflinchingly dissects the familiar, and often irreconcilable tension between commitment and self-realization, daily partnership and romantic fantasy–A page-turner."

Abraham also edited the Dutch anthology Een sterke vrouw: Jewish Heroines in Literature (Meulenhoff, 2000). Her recent essays appeared in Who We Are (Schocken Books), The Michigan Quarterly, and "Forward." Recent short stories have appeared in "Epoch"(Cornell), "Forward," and Brooklyn Noir (Akashic Press). Her story "Hasidic Noir" won the 2006 Shamus Award for Best Short Story About a Private Eye. Abraham grew up in a Hasidic family, the third of nine children. She graduated from Hunter College and received an MFA degree in Creative Writing from New York University.

Skidmore's series of Perlow events is made possible with support from the estate of Jacob Perlow, who emigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s and was committed to furthering Jewish education.

Click here to read "A Conversation with Pearl Abraham."