Channelling Rhoda: How One Writers came to write another's unpublished novel

Rhoda Lerman was known as a “writer’s writer.” Jewish, feminist, inspired by both spirituality and folklore, the critical darling was compared with Isaac Bashevis Singer and dubbed “the female Philip Roth.” Having written works of both fiction and non-fiction over a five-decade-long career, Rhoda Lerman died in 2015, leaving behind a novel she’d been working on for the previous ten years. That’s where I came in.

On Saturdays, the Lower East Side Needle Exchange Walkabout starts off from Third Street and Avenue C and moves downtown.

Carl took particular pleasure in challenging the people around him while simultaneously involving them in his schemes.

The jumpy dude lingering on the sidewalk said, “Moving to 5R?”

“Uh, yeah,” I answered, unsure whether to answer, but he seemed to know anyway.

“Where the murder happened, right? Listen to me.” He leaned closer. “You don’t live there, you survive.”

A meteor shrieks across the sky. Someone at the bonfire says it’s Derrick heading to Acoma, the pueblo south of here where his father was born.

I stumble over in my boxers to look out her bedroom window, where the World Trade Center towers spurt like smokestacks less than two miles south of the East Village.

Ninth Street Nostalgia: Nice to have heat, but what else is lost?

Approximately fifty years and counting: every fourth Thursday, deal these ladies In.

Swimming along the coast, we find two more caves, watched over by numerous cormorants. One cave entrance mysteriously ascends upwards. Had we our flashlight, we’d now be rich in pirate booty.

When Fredda got through the woods health-wise, she told me, she planned to go on casting calls again.

Skinny, with bookish glasses, Carlos later told me he had been there approximately one minute before I accosted him. Perched on the next stool over, I startled the handsome Spaniard with an eruptive conversational geyser—a manifestation of the Manhattan bends.

There I had an unhappy surprise: the car’s key was no longer in my swimming trunks’ pocket.

If Russ experienced keener pain, he also felt beauty more deeply. Driving through Kettle Moraine, spotting a lovely hillside stand of trees, no one could feel more joy at the perfection of nature's design.

At the Palms Springs Writers Conference, Nita was convinced I had authored a book entitled Mars 2003.

Laine said that sometimes bush taxi drivers would slam on the gas, then the brakes; riders would then fly forward and five more people could be stuffed in before the door was slammed shut. If that happened, a person could be left sitting on half an ass for a whole trip, five hours or more. Now, with both ass cheeks secured, Kribi was just two hours away.