Recent Interviews
An interview in the Southeast Review has just been posted (September 2009). Read it online here.
An interview is available in the Reform Judaism Magazine (March 2009). Read it online here.
From The Kenyon Review Online (October 2008)
Erika Dreifus has written a review that is now up on the Kenyon Review Online website, just in time for the Kenyon Review Literary Festival!
Winner of the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction (September 2008)
The Pale of Settlement has been named the winner of the Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction. "The Pale of Settlement is perhaps the most impressive literary representation to date of the complex relationship between contemporary American Jews and the State of Israel,” wrote the judges for the 2008 Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction." Read more here.
From LILITH (Summer 2008):
"The yearning for independence and the effort to sustain an identity pulsate throughout these masterful stories. A talented artist of the Jewish scene in Israel and the Diaspora, Singer is a new writer to savor."
Winner of the Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers (July 2008)
From the final judge, Cathy Hankla: "THE PALE OF SETTLEMENT is a stunning collection of interwoven narratives that delves deep into the human need for both belonging and moral integrity. Singer examines origins, cruelties and beliefs in the context of the nefarious nature of memory as a vehicle for obtaining truth. While some of Singer’s characters are literally digging for material shards that might prove ancient texts valid, the ashes of another character are by chance winds. Impermanence and timeless truth struggle in these pages, finding characters, language and form that are at once recognizable and original."
Read more here.
Finalist for the 2008 John Gardner Fiction Book Award
Go here for more details (June 2008).
To The Best of Our Knowledge segment, "Can Writers Save Israel?" (week of May 18, 2008)
In Segment One, Susan Abulhawa, author of "The Scar of David" and of Palestinian descent, and Margot Singer, an American Jew and author of "The Pale of Settlement" talk with Steve Paulson about their experiences and writing about life in the refugee camps of the West Bank. Listen to the program here.
Hemingway Foundation/PEN Honorable Mention (March 2008) The Pale of Settlement has been awarded an Honorable Mention by the judges of the 2008 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award! Read the press release here.
From Jewish Book World (Spring 5768/2008)
"These short stories meander through time, back three generations, from a daughter to her mother to her mother's mother, and back again. Susan, the American daughter of Israeli parents, struggles between cultures in the process of looking for herself--the same challenge undertaken by her mother as a young married emigrant in America and by her grandmother as a pioneer in the newly established State of Israel after the Holocaust. Singer explores each woman through her relationships, those that persist and those that fail, those that change and those that never even begin. Indeed, every story tells us a truth personal yet universal, relevant, and lasting. A winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, Singer writes clearly, succinctly, and effectively. The characters are believable, and the stories uplifting but realistic. Modern issues--terrorism and the second Lebanon war--intrude, but do not overwhelm, a testament to Singer's skill and artistry."
From NewPages (Feb 2008)
"Margot Singer’s investigation of what it is to remember and what it means to understand one’s past...rounds out an impressive first collection. Singer’s authorial hand is patient yet playful and confident when delving into the most personal of mistakes and shortcomings. The Pale of Settlement impressively divides and intertwines one family’s history with an changing, uncertain present."
- Link to the review at www.newpages.com
From the interview in Nextbook (Jan 9, 2008)
"In fiction, as in life, things are not always resolved. It is not dissimilar to the issue of who has the more deserving claim on the land of Israel; there just isn’t going to be closure. Fragmentation is an important theme in the book. Identity is incomplete. We try to piece together pieces of memory and history and create a narrative of who we are and that isn’t easy. What we have in the end are little bits that come together to form stories. I think that in this world we have learned to be skeptical about stories that only have one version or wrap up too tidily."
- Link to the interview at www.nextbook.org
From the Columbus Dispatch (Dec. 10, 2007) "Singer...deftly sets larger political themes next to smaller personal ones, as the daily choices her characters make reflect the larger forces that have set those characters and their ancestors into motion.... The linked short stories that make up The Pale of Settlement work far better than a more conventional narrative would in telling the tale of Susan's family. Theirs is a story with more gaps than connections, sometimes touched by frightening emptiness but also capable of the heady freedom of open space."
From the Miami Herald (Dec. 9, 2007)
"Margot Singer's seasoned and deeply moving interlinked stories about politics, memory and identity read more like the work of a veteran novelist and add up to one of the most astonishing literary debuts in recent memory. And in the enduring and ever-evolving character named Susan, the collection's primary focus, Singer brings to life a complex and wonderfully memorable young woman reminiscent of other recurring Jewish American heroines who undergo wrenching transformations, such as Cynthia Ozick's Ruth Puttermesser or the late Grace Paley's Faith Darwin."
-- Review by Ranen Omer-Sherman in The Miami Herald
From National Public Radio (Oct. 22, 2007)
"Singer's lead story, "Helicopter Days," opens in Haifa during Israel's 1982 war with Lebanon within earshot of a bomb blast. Susan, a young Israeli-born New Yorker, has made her first solo visit to the Holy Land, which begins a long love affair between her and her family's history and a long flirtation with an Israeli cousin, Gavi...Susan pays equally careful attention to the sources of her own past, unearthing stories of Israeli soldiers in shock, unfaithful wives and unsettled expatriates, even going so far as to raise questions about her own paternity. The triumph of Singer's "The Pale of Settlement" is that we enjoy the questions as much as any answers that might appear."
From Publishers Weekly
"Setting nine linked stories against a turbulent political background, Singer follows New York City journalist Susan Stern over two decades, as she flounders through a string of failed love affairs and maintains close relationships with Israeli relatives. Visiting her paternal grandparents in Haifa, Susan finds Israel relatively normal despite the 1982 Lebanon War. She loses some of her naïveté when her soldier-cousin, Gavi, joins a cult in the aftermath; after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Gavi's behavior becomes even more difficult to navigate. By that point, Susan realizes she still has feelings for an ex-boyfriend who calls in a panic to confess that a casual girlfriend is pregnant with his child. Susan's affair with a married man is told in tandem with a tale about her grandmother's difficult first years in British-occupied Haifa, while a maternal uncle who is a Jerusalem archeologist digs up a more recent, and more uncomfortable, truth. The latter revelation is touched off by 2002 reports of violence in Israel: Susan feels guilt and responsibility for the ongoing political crisis, but also a deep yearning for the country. Many story lines go unresolved, but the end result is a pungent composite portrait of a strong, complicated woman." (October 2007)
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Advance Praise
"Margot Singer gives brave and eloquent voice to a new generation of Jewish wanderers in a global diaspora. In her stories, Israel is the first, enduring love, the place of origin and ending--but for many of her Israeli characters, a difficult and increasingly destructive love."
--Judith Grossman, author of Her Own Terms
"These are very personal stories embedded in the public sphere--a deft braiding together of private life and the political and religious context in which desire unfolds. Margot Singer's collection of interlinked tales is full of both promise and delivery: a first-rate debut."
--Nicholas Delbanco, author of Spring and Fall
"It is awe-inspiring to witness the nine converging storms in The Pale of Settlement. Readers yearning for the elemental forces to return to American fiction will applaud Margot Singer's thundering debut."
--Kevin McIlvoy, author of The Complete History of New Mexico: Stories
