DEBORAH COPAKEN KOGAN

Here's the essay, published in this week's Forward. Thanks, Letty, for the suggestion.

Hey, check this out...I ordered a bunch of T-shirts that look like what will hopefully appear in the column next to this post. Until I post again, that is, and these words get pushed farther south. (God I wish this blog template would allow for photos in the body of the blog itself. Are you listening, authorsguild.net sitebuilder?) The shirts are supposed to arrive August 14th, four days before the book launches. When they do--if they do (call me a Luddite, but I'm still amazed by the idea of ordering something online and having it magically appear on my doorstep)--we'll figure out some sort of bloggy giveaway. Stay tuned...

I just posted this on facebook, but I thought I might as well post it here as well. Here's the basic concept: we authors are always white-washing our "In Praise of..." blurb sections of our books to keep out the mean stuff. But sometimes the mean stuff is a lot more entertaining (at least to everyone except the author, that is, at least at first.) I thought it would be unfair to steal lines from the comments section of Amazon--too easy--or from really any of the free-for-all comments sections deriding books and authors that have grown like troll mushrooms on the www, so all of these "In Condemnation of..." blurbs below were reprinted from legit publications. The kind you might, say, wrap your fish in if you were so inclined. As an extra added bonus fun game, see if you can figure out which ones were composed by males, which by females. (more…)

Okay, so I started writing a new blog post at the beginning of the week--my goal is to update this thing once a week--but then it grew into a mini-treatise on living in Harlem in our so-called post-racial world, and I started to like it more as an essay, and so now I'm trying to sell it, so you'll just have to wait to read it until I either sell it (in which case I'll post the link when it's published) or not (in which case I'll cut and paste it in its entirety here.)

Meanwhile, for your reading pleasure, please click here to read an article in this week's Jewish Daily Forward about the changing notion of the Jewish mother in which I'm quoted once, but my friend Ayelet is quoted a whole lot, and she's worth listening to. She's funny, she's topical, she does not mince words, and I love her deeply. In fact, click here, too, and you can buy her new book, Bad Mother. You'll like it. I promise.

Yes, I know, I know. It's been a long time since my last post. Nearly six months, to be precise. I needed that silence to mourn, to work, to survive this tumultuous year without reporting on every last nuance of it. Let's face it: it was getting a little depressing, no? However, I'm happy to report that things are on the upswing for the Kogans. My husband has a new job he loves; I have a new book contract to write a novel; I've been doing some magazine work (just got back from Moscow for More Magazine; I'll post a link here when the story is available to read); my book of essays comes out soon; and in June we moved our family of five out of our bank account-crushing Upper West Side two-bedroom to a new home in Harlem. It was move of desperation which has turned out to be not only better than we thought but actually revelatory. We love our new, larger, cheaper home. And we're grateful that fate conspired to bring us here. (more…)