Judy Brown

Judy Brown wrote the controversial novel Hush--a finalist for the 2011 Sydney Taylor Award for outstanding book on the Jewish experience--under a pseudonym because of feared backlash from the Chassidic world. Brown's identity has since been revealed and she has left Chassidism. She has been profiled in The New York Times Magazine and has written for the Huffington Post and the Jewish Daily Forward. She holds a master's in creative writing and lives in New York City.

Brown's new memoir is This Is Not a Love Story.

Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:

The Slave Trade, by Hugh Thomas

This is the kind of book you read over a period of time, to better process, ponder, and fully digest. Reading too much at once is unsettling for the mind. It is 798 pages on the slave trade, encompassing the span of thousands of years, covering the roots of this most ancient of markets, that of man trading man for money and power. The scope is breathtaking, covering the role of states and government, politics and background, individuals and family tragedies. The sources are taken from journals, diaries, histories and documents from Greece, to China, to the Carolinas. This is a book that gives one pause because forces the reader to readjust his entire viewpoint, to encounter suppressed history, and buried pasts, and the role nearly every one of us—at some point in time and heritage— played in the institution of slavery.

Visit Judy Brown's website.

My Book, The Movie: This Is Not a Love Story.

--Marshal Zeringue