Five Books, holiday edition: Nine hardbacks—including Philip Schultz’s memoir, a history of the orgasm, and Alfred Kazin’s journals—for the readers on your list

Lost Books

Alfred Kazin brought out the Jew in Emerson, the mystic in sex, and the terrible beauty in community. There’s no better guide for the “social me” age.

Junketing to South America in the late 1960s with Robert Lowell, a wealthy Venezuelan, and Alfred Kazin. An excerpt from the forthcoming memoir Lucky Bruce.

Yuri Suhl’s One Foot in America, a long-lost novel of Jewish American immigration that reads like a more Dickensian take on Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, has been republished and deserves a new audience

Alfred Kazin’s journals were more than just repositories for literary reflections; they were the laboratories in which he fashioned the writer—and Jew—he aspired to be

A new biography tries to untangle painter Lee Krasner from the husband whose outsize personality and paint-splattered canvasses left her in the shadows

Jotted down: letters, diaries, recipes, and other random scribblings

David Grossman, Amos Oz, and A.B. Yehoshua have won international acclaim for being the intellectual leaders of Israel’s peace camp. It’s undeserved.

An excerpt from a new history of Commentary shows how the fiction published in the magazine’s early years shook not just the world of Jewish literature but the very foundations of American letters