“While nearly every Jewish female reader will find herself reflected here, the poignancy of these stories will be felt by readers of all ethnicities.”—Library Journal Chicken soup and Barbra Streisand, lost fathers and first dates, Hebrew school and Queen Esther, seders and seductions. In this insightful, original anthology, forty-five American Jewish writers explore the richness of their shared heritage, from the tragic to the trivial. In memoirs, fiction, and poetry new and favorite writers like Grace Paley, Amy Bloom, Vivian Gornick, and Laura Cunningham brilliantly reveal the challenges of coming of age as a Jewish woman in America today. What have we lost that our mothers and grandmothers had? Do we still feel close ties to family and community? Can we make a decent pot roast? This spirited collection is full of humor and wisdom, memory and affection—and there isn’t a Jewish girl (nice or otherwise) who won’t find herself reflected in these vibrant pages.

Nice Jewish Girls: Growing Up in America

Biographies & Memoirs

Grace Paley

Laura Shaine Cunningham

Dinah Berland

Persis Knobbe

Susan Merson

More

Community & Culture

Plume

Beautiful Bodies

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Washington Square Press

This is the magical memoir of Lily Shaine, an orphan brought up by her two eccentric bachelor uncles in New York in the 1950s. Uncle Len is a six-foot-six-inch private investigator, a trench-coated cross between Abraham Lincoln and Sam Spade. Uncle Gabe, a librarian, is a confirmed dreamer who writes gospel songs in his spare time. With these two men as mentors, the human jungle of the Bronx as her playground, the schoolroom as her torture chamber and very knowing little girls as her playmates, Lily learns the secrets of life, sex, death and, above all, family love. A wry, funny and deeply affectionate portrait of the most unlikely of happy families, "Sleeping Arrangements" is a modern classic.

Sleeping Arrangements

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

8 cassettes, 11 hours
Laura Shaine Cunningham follows her much loved memoir, Sleeping Arrangements, with this chronicle of a life long love affair with the country. After growing up an orphan raised by her uncles in crowded New York apartments, Cunningham embarks on the search for "the perfect place." Along the way she has many adventures, making a film on location in a decrepit chicken farm in Woodstock, roaming the romantic estates in Tuxedo Park, then finding her dream house, a former stagecoach inn, sold by an English Lord and Lady in upstate New York. Her story is filled with surprise pleasures, encounters with runaway cows, and gentrified groundhogs who learn to love mesclun mix. The New York Times Book Review compared this "sharp and witty" book to the classic The Egg and I, predicting that readers would savor the story 50 years from now. Laura Shaine Cunningham is an award-winning playwright and author, whose books have been excerpted in The New Yorker. People magazine called her writing "comic, touching, delightful."

A Place in the Country

Arts & Literature

Recorded Books,LLC

this collection contains two full-length plays: BANG, BEAUTIFUL BODIES, and one long one-act: CRUISING CLOSE TO CRAZY

Plays By Laura Shaine Cunningham

Dramas & Plays

Broadway Play Pub

In Sleeping Arrangements, Laura Shaine Cunningham introduced us to her childhood self. Now she tells us what became of that little girl--and her lifelong quest to find the perfect country home.

Regional U.S.

Riverhead Books

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Books by Laura Shaine Cunningham