Bad Jews and Other Stories

Bad Jews and Other Stories is a nuanced and comic vision of life, love, and spiritual adventurism among the determinedly secular class of contemporary American Jews. Separated from the character-building hardships endured by their parents and grandparents, unable to find a faith of their own or for that matter to believe in much of anything at all, the characters of Bad Jews and Other Stories wander through the moral landscape of their lives in a loopy version of the Children of Israel’s meandering way home. Along the way they suffer a range of antic, often absurd misadventures. And as often as not they find redemption as well as disaster.

Gerald Shapiro (1950–2011) was a professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He is the author of From Hunger: Stories, editor of American Jewish Fiction: A Century of Stories (Nebraska 1998), and winner of the Ohio State University Short Fiction Prize for a collection of novellas and stories titled Little Men.

“Brimming with keen insight into the psyches of hilarious, even lovable, losers, the wacky brilliance of these remarkable stories marks Shapiro as a writer to watch.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Bad Jews marks the emergence of another original voice on the contemporary Jewish American literary scene—a voice that registers in often richly comic and profoundly moving ways.”—Forward