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Articles by Mark Sarvas
His Blessed Keys
(Sorry to start off with such a long one, and a personal one, to boot - been tinkering with this one for years, let it be a Weekend Read!) Labors For years, my father kept his hotel room keys. He displayed them in the basement of our Queens home, hanging over dusty bottles of Chivas and Cinzano over what was then his wetbar, and later his office. He must have installed the little hooks on which the keys hung though I don’t remember him doing it. They simply appeared one day after school.
Memento Park | Mark Sarvas | Macmillan
Winner of the 2019 Association of Jewish Libraries Jewish Fiction Award, short-listed for the 2019 JQ Wingate Literary Prize, and a Finalist for the 2019 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature One of Entertainment Weekly’s 20 Books to Read in March and one of TimeOut’s 11 Books You’ll Want to Binge-Read This Month A son learns more about his father than he ever could have imagined when a mysterious piece of art is unexpectedly restored to him After receiving an unexpected call from the...
Playing it by the book in Santa Monica. Gateway to the Fairmont Miramar Hotel & Bungalows reading program.
Fairmont Miramar Hotel & Bungalows provides an escape for bookworms. (image by Christian Horan Photography) Many words come to mind when describing Southern California’s beach communities – sunny and warm, breezy and fun, or even, without exaggeration, paradisiacal – but “literary” is probably not among them.
Summer Reading! - Jewish Ledger
Summer is the perfect time to take a relaxing break from the great big (sometimes burdensome) world and lose yourself in a good book. What to read? We checked out the Jewish Book Council at www.jewishbookcouncil.org – and came away with an enticing list of books with Jewish content or Jewish themes that were published in 2018/2019. So, pull up a beach chair, pop open the beach umbrella…and start reading. The Girl from Berlin By Ronald H.
One Book | One Community Programs and Events
Sly and searching—The New York Times Book Review For the eighth year in a row, celebrate Jewish Book Month with One Book | One Community, in which a single title is selected for discussions and activities across greater Chicago. Spertus Institute proudly spearheads this initiative. Set in LA, NY, and Budapest (with a short stop in Chicago), Memento Park begins with an unexpected call from the Australian consulate.
3 fun community and culture events in Chicago this weekend
© Photo: Freestocks.org/Unsplash Photo: Freestocks.org/ Unsplash Looking to get out into the community this weekend? From a documentary screening to a holiday bazaar, there's plenty to do when it comes to community and cultural meetups coming up in Chicago. Read on for a rundown. Hoodline offers data-driven analysis of local happenings and trends across cities. Links included in this article may earn Hoodline a commission on clicks and transactions.
3 fun community and culture events in Chicago this weekend
Looking to get out into the community this weekend? From a documentary screening to a holiday bazaar, there's plenty to do when it comes to community and cultural meetups coming up in Chicago. Read on for a rundown. Hoodline offers data-driven analysis of local happenings and trends across cities. Links included in this article may earn Hoodline a commission on clicks and transactions.
Memento Park by Mark Sarvas
This Year’s One Book is a Journey of Discovery By Betsy Gomberg for JUF News. Readers can celebrate Jewish Book Month in November with One Book | One Community, in which a single book is selected, read, and explored through author appearances and book discussions across the city and suburbs. As in previous years, the One Book initiative is spearheaded by Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership. This year’s selection is Memento Park by California author Mark Sarvas.
A Father-Son Novel Served With a Twist
There are a number of con artists in Mark Sarvas’s second novel, “Memento Park” — some heavy on the con; others, the art. Principal among them is Matt Santos, a C-list actor and the novel’s narrator, who is more focused on telling his story than his acting. His life is upended when he learns that a valuable painting may have been stolen from his family’s Budapest home during World War II. The painting, now in the hands of the IRS, could become his.
He’s a Lifer at Angola. He’s Black. Was He Falsely Convicted?
“The whole of anything,” Henry James once wrote, “is never told.” The unnamed narrator of Zachary Lazar’s absorbing and prismatic new novel, “Vengeance,” would surely confirm this sentiment. Lazar’s is a literature of working through, “a groping around in the unknowable,” as he calls it. He is at least as interested in how the story is told as in the story itself. The story in “Vengeance” is superficially straightforward and painfully familiar.
Is It Worth 1,000 Words? Mark Sarvas on Writing Art in Fiction
Like so many readers, my first exposure to a painting in literature came from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Memento Park
Matt Santos, the protagonist of Mark Sarvas’s compelling second novel, Memento Park, gives himself away on the book’s opening page. “I am aware of my presence in this room,” he says, “of the figure I must appear to cut, my fealty always to my unseen audience.” Matt is a reasonably successful B-list character actor.
A Year in Reading: Zoë Ruiz
I'm currently reading Aisha Sabatini Sloan's essay collection Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit, which was chosen by Maggie Nelson as the winner of the 1913 Open Prose Contest. I've been an admirer of Sloan's essays since her first collection, The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White, was published. I read Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely and now I'm rereading Citizen.
Cubicle Rats - NYTimes.com
When the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno said that “work is the only practical consolation for having been born,” he could not have foreseen the lot of the 21st-century cubicle drones who populate Ed Park’s witty and appealing first novel, “Personal Days.” Today, it seems, notions of work have been transformed from “every man a king” to mass e-mailings of cat pictures.
Critical Notes: Sarah Vowell, Nabokov, Oliver Sacks, Jean-Phillipe Blondel, and more
This is the eleventh in Critical Mass's new Second Thoughts series, curated by Daniel Akst. More about this series, and how to submit, here. Is there any book in the American canon more prone to acting as a twisted mirror than The Catcher in the Rye? If you were one of the many readers to read it in the full blush of adolescence, as most do, Catcher is one of those books which acts so easily as a cry straight into the heart of your own rebellion.
Second Thoughts: Mark Sarvas on From Russia With Love
This is the ninth in Critical Mass's new Second Thoughts series, curated by Daniel Akst. More about this series, and how to submit, here. The arrival of Spectre, the 24th official James Bond film from Eon Productions, in American theaters has been accompanied by the usual frenzy of 007 listicles, think pieces and arcana. The Bond films have demonstrated astonishing cultural longevity – it’s been 53 years since Sean Connery holstered his Walther PPK and launched a global phenomenon.
Second Thoughts: Mark Sarvas on From Russia With Love
This is the ninth in Critical Mass's new Second Thoughts series, curated by Daniel Akst. More about this series, and how to submit, here. The arrival of Spectre, the 24th official James Bond film from Eon Productions, in American theaters has been accompanied by the usual frenzy of 007 listicles, think pieces and arcana. The Bond films have demonstrated astonishing cultural longevity – it’s been 53 years since Sean Connery holstered his Walther PPK and launched a global phenomenon.
Second Thoughts: Mark Sarvas on From Russia With Love
This is the ninth in Critical Mass's new Second Thoughts series, curated by Daniel Akst. More about this series, and how to submit, here. The arrival of Spectre, the 24th official James Bond film from Eon Productions, in American theaters has been accompanied by the usual frenzy of 007 listicles, think pieces and arcana. The Bond films have demonstrated astonishing cultural longevity – it’s been 53 years since Sean Connery holstered his Walther PPK and launched a global phenomenon.
Critical Notes: John Irving, Richard Dawkins, Hanya Yanagihara, Ron Rash, Mary-Louise Parker…
This is the ninth in Critical Mass's new Second Thoughts series, curated by Daniel Akst. More about this series, and how to submit, here. The arrival of Spectre, the 24th official James Bond film from Eon Productions, in American theaters has been accompanied by the usual frenzy of 007 listicles, think pieces and arcana. The Bond films have demonstrated astonishing cultural longevity – it’s been 53 years since Sean Connery holstered his Walther PPK and launched a global phenomenon.
Second Thoughts: Joanna Scutts on Emma
This is the tenth in Critical Mass's new Second Thoughts series, curated by Daniel Akst. More about this series, and how to submit, here. I remember how my first copy of Emma looked far more clearly than I remember first reading it. It was part of a set along with Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice— dusty pink hardcovers with deckle-edged pages, neither old nor valuable but seeming both to me. Inside, words were spelled oddly: shew and ancle, stopt and staid.
‘Book of Numbers,’ by Joshua Cohen
“For last year’s words belong to last year’s language,” T.S. Eliot wrote, “and next year’s words await another voice.” It would be hard to find a more apt description of Joshua Cohen and his brilliantly exhausting fourth novel, “Book of Numbers.” On its surface, the book is about a struggling New York novelist hired as an Internet billionaire’s ghostwriter — but its breadth, the ambition of its ideas and devices, confounds standard book review responses.
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