Welcome to Forward Reads, your monthly tour of the Jewish literary landscape. I'm a culture writer at the Forward, and I spend a lot of time combing through new releases so you can read the best books out there. If you like this newsletter, forward it to a friend and encourage them to sign up here.

For an author whose books reliably land on bestseller charts and lists of important titles, Rivka Galchen is remarkably nice to chat with on Zoom. She also coined the catchiest title of the summer — ”Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch” — for her second novel, a fictional account of a very real 17th-century witchcraft trial. We talked about writing routines (or lack thereof) and the benefits of actually liking your characters.

Her morning routine:

When I wrote my first novel I had this amazing morning routine. The Hungarian Pastry Shop was near my home. It opened at 7 a.m., I would be the first one there, I would have 45 minutes of cookies and coffee and spacing out. After my daughter was born, which was 1,000 years ago (she’s 8), that was just dynamited.

Her biggest distraction:

Well, we got a pandemic cat. I feel like she needs my love all day long.

What she’s reading with her daughter:

The D’Aulaire Greek myths. Even though it’s all about Zeus and his sexual exploits — that’s the main plot, one after another set of children he has to hide from his wife — she really loves it.

The best part of her latest book: I really liked my main character. She was tangled up with people I love, and kinds of people I love. You don’t always like your characters; if I have a character who resembles me, then of course I’m not going to like them as much.

Jerusalem Prize-winning author Joyce Carol Oates excels at giving corporeal form to intangible demons. In her 2012 gothic novel “The Accursed,” the racist ideology permeating a 20th-century college town materializes as a crew of vampires. In “Breathe,” it’s the forces of grief that come to life.

Set in the austere hills of New Mexico, Oates's latest follows a writer, Michaela, who abruptly loses her husband to an aggressive cancer. As a new widow, Michaela descends into an underworld of her own, a surreal psychological landscape of mourning haunted by mythical spirits and spectral incarnations of her husband. In Oates’ depiction, grief is as viscerally horrifying as it is darkly funny. (The atrocious portmanteau “cremains” is a source of many puns.)

“Breathe” is based on the 2019 death of Oates’ husband Charlie Gross, a cognitive scientist. (The book’s cover image is a photo he took.) But I couldn’t read its depictions of sudden, disorienting loss (not to mention crazy-making medical bureaucracy) without thinking of the coronavirus pandemic.

“It is always a challenge to find the universal in personal, private experience,” Oates told me over email. “But some experiences are so ravaging, they seem almost to enter us from an impersonal source, like an invasion.” Read our full interview with Oates here.

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First-time author Iddo Gefen has a literary background, but not the one you’d think: As a researcher at Tel Aviv’s Sagol Brain Institute, he used storytelling exercises to diagnose Parkinson’s disease. Most stories in “Jerusalem Beach,” which was first published in Hebrew in 2017, probe that hazy boundary between science and stories. In one, a teenager retreats into an eerie dreamscape while her parents frequently search for medical issues; in another, a woman with Alzheimer’s fabricates false memories of a beach in Jerusalem.

Gefen’s work reminded me of Nicole Krauss, with whom he shares the ability to present absurd situations through the voices of characters who couldn’t be taking things more seriously. Though Gefen has a ways to go before he acquires the uncanny control Krauss exercises over her prose, he’s a debut author to watch.

“You think the Shadow is Jewish? Sherlock Holmes? Nero Wolfe? Jews don’t get to do that kind of stuff.”

That’s the feedback 12-year-old Sheldon Horowitz, self-declared detective, gets from a friend when he decides to find the culprit of his father’s (seemingly) accidental death in a car crash. His bucolic Massachusetts childhood abruptly terminated, Sheldon lands in 1930s Hartford, where a domestic espionage plot unfolds amid the specter of rising fascism overseas. “How to Find Your Way in the Dark” isn’t exactly subtle about its intentions: inserting Jews into the crime genre. But that doesn’t make it any less charming.

Serwer, a writer for The Atlantic who became one of the most prominent commentators on the Trump era, is notable for clear headed, non-handwringing analysis. Now, he's compiled four years of essays (including the viral 2018 piece that gave this book its title) into a single collection.

While Serwer’s writing is political, not personal, his own Black and Jewish background illuminates some of the book’s best chapters. A standout essay on the antisemitism of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan opens with a teenage Serwer sitting angrily in his high school cafeteria while most of his peers attended the Million Man March, which he calls “one of the loneliest days of my young life.” While arguing that Farrakhan repurposes European antisemitism to blame Jews for white supremacy, Serwer explores fairly the Nation of Islam's accomplishments in underserved communities and the reasons why present-day activists often resist pressure to disavow it.

Jennie Wexler’s debut contains literally everything you could want from a young adult novel: A funeral on the first page, teens engaging in precocious banter, oblivious moms with nose jobs and meathead jocks getting their just desserts. When marching-band comrades Drew and Shane meet rebellious new girl Stevie Rosenstein, they toss a coin to determine who gets to ask her out. Thanks to the book’s dual narrative structure, we get to watch both outcomes unfold. Real-life high school experiences (that is to say, mine) rarely quite stack up to YA drama, and there’s no shortage of improbable escapades here. But “Where It All Lands” was a nostalgic return to a time when every decision felt life-defining.