Award-winning author Joseph Skibell talks of Talmudic tales

Prize-winning novelist Joseph Skibell will present "Heaven and Its Discontents: Spiritual Dramas of the Talmud" next Weds., Nov. 16, at noon in the Texas Hillel Library.

Skibell, the author of three novels, will discuss his recent work on a collection of essays about Talmudic tales. Little known and underappreciated, these stories form a second narrative, a grand tragedy within the legal discourse of the Talmud.

Indeed, the narrative is so strong that Skibell, as a visiting professor at the Michener Center for Writers, designed a fall 2011 graduate-level course around it. "[T]hese legends, tall tales, and eye-opening spiritual dramas are often as complex and meaningful as the Greek tragedies," Skibell writes in his course description. Skibell will discuss these "amazing, wonderful, and wild stories" in his lecture next week.

Lunch will be served. Please RSVP to galit@mail.utexas.edu.

Click here to read Benyamin Cohen's 2010 interview with Skibell on the Huffington Post, in which Skibell discusses his third novel and the prevalence of Jewish themes in his work.

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Joseph Skibell is an alumnus of the University of Texas and the Michener Center for Writers. He is professor of English at Emory University and the author of three acclaimed novels: A Blessing on the Moon, winner of the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation award of the Academy of Arts and Letters; The English Disease; and A Curable Romantic,winner of the 2011 Sami Rohr Choice Award for Jewish literature.  His work has been widely anthologized and his short stories and essays have appeared in Story, Tikkun, The New York Times, Poets & Writers and other periodicals.