Awake in the Dark

By Shira Nayman

Awake in the Dark is a fitting book to read in the darkening days of autumn as the pagans go searching for goblins, ghosts and witches.

You’ll find plenty of monsters in this collection of short stories, but you’ll also find plenty of people surviving the impossible with courage and strength. Every character in these stories is pushed into facing a truth about themselves and their origins that has either been kept secret – or which they have hidden from the world.

An address mumbled by a dying mother, a daughter's insistent questions about her mother's -- and thus her own -- origins or straightforward instructions left following a death, tear away the veil of secrecy and force the main characters in these tales to discover or reexamine who they are.

Wandering Stars

Edited by Jack Dann 

Jewish science fiction?!! YES! And why should we be surprised? After all, how much of a stretch is it between Noah collecting paired biological samples and sailing off in an ark to unknown lands following a cataclysmic natural disaster and the Starship Enterprise boldly going where no one has gone before?

Some of the stories in editor Jack Dann’s collection are enduring and familiar; some read like a Yiddish theater group cast to play an episode of “Star Trek.” The authors included range from Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer to Isaac Asimov and Harlan Ellison with contributions from William Tenn, Pamela Sargent, Avram Davidson and Carol Carr.