Reviews of The Wedding Jester

“Rich and wondrous, these nine tales confirm Stern’s distinctive place in modern American Jewish fiction, as he continues to stake out his own unique territory where history and myth intersect, where Jewish legends, mysticism and ancient traditions implode into the everyday with dazzling and unforeseen consequences. With empathy and bracing wit, Stern’s enjoyable stories seismically chart the collision of the Old World and the New, of undying religious traditions and modern secularism, of lust and love, faith and doubt.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“There are many reasons to savor Stern’s stories—they remind us of worlds and folkloric traditions long faded from memory, as well as of the imagination’s wilder side—but perhaps the most telling of all is the sheer pleasure they provide.” —Washington Post Book World

“For nearly 20 years now, Mr. Stern has rendered shimmering fictional landscapes. Through his imagination, he continues to retrieve Jewish worlds—the Pinch, the Catskills, the Lower East Side and the shtetl—that are rapidly fading from memory. He does more than merely empathize with the ghosts, or what are soon to be ghosts, of these Jewish locales. Rather, he loves them. He delights in them. He revels in their brushes with the magical realm amid their often sordid environs, their powers of transcendence, but celebrates even more profoundly their common humanity—awkward, fallible, bumbling, sometimes blind, but, above all endearing and, yes, magical in its own right.” —Jewish Forward

“To be a true inheritor of a tradition carries with it the responsibility of expanding that tradition and keeping it vital. In The Wedding Jester, Steve Stern does both. Only a writer with a deep reverence for and a connection with the ancient story-telling power of his rich folkloric sources could concoct the often irreverently comic twists that distinguish these genuinely marvelous—and always vital—stories.” —Stuart Dybek

“What good news—more stories by Steve Stern! I am a zealous admirer of his one-of-a-kind imagination and his miraculous sentences.” —Cynthia Ozick