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      Jürgen Moltmann, Who Reconciled Religion With Suffering, Dies at 98

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      Considered one of the leading Christian theologians of the 20th century, he insisted that any established set of beliefs had to confront the implications of Auschwitz.Jürgen Moltmann, who drew on his searing experiences as a German soldier during World War II to construct transformative ideas about God, Jesus and salvation in a fallen world, making him one of the leading Protestant theologians of the 20th century, died on Monday at his home in Tübingen, in southwest Germany. He was 98.His daughter Anne-Ruth Moltmann-Willisch confirmed the death.Dr. Moltmann, who spent most of his career as a professor at the University of Tübingen, played a central role in Christianity’s struggle to come to grips with the Nazi era, insisting that any established set of beliefs had to confront the theological implications of Auschwitz.As a teenage conscript in the German Army, he barely escaped death during an Allied bombing raid on Hamburg in 1943. The horrors of the war led him to chart a path between those who insisted that faith was now meaningless and those who wanted a return to the doctrines of the past as if the Nazi era had never occurred.Though his work ranged widely, including ecological and feminist theology, he specialized in the branch of theology known as eschatology, which is concerned with the disposition of the soul after death and the end of the world, when Christians believe that Christ will return to earth.Dr. Moltmann outlined his eschatology, and established his reputation, with a trilogy of books, beginning with “The Theology of Hope” in 1964.“Theology of Hope” (1964), the first book in a trilogy, established Dr. Moltmann’s reputation.Fortress PressDr. Moltmann’s next work, “The Crucified God” (1972), tackled the question: Does God suffer, or, as the all-powerful being, is he incapable of experiencing pain and sorrow?Fortress PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Yael Dayan, Israeli Writer, Politician and Daughter of War Hero, Dies at 85

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      She was hailed for her books and admired for promoting women’s rights. But her support for a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict angered many.Yael Dayan, a celebrated Israeli writer who, after the death of her father, the war hero and statesman Moshe Dayan, entered politics and became a proponent of women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. issues and a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict, died on May 18 at her home in Tel Aviv. She was 85.Her daughter, Racheli Sion-Sarid, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Ms. Dayan was the last surviving child of Mr. Dayan, who served as Israel’s defense minister during the Six-Day War in 1967 and the Yom Kippur War in 1973. With his distinctive black eyepatch — he had lost his left eye in combat fighting with the British in World War II — he was the unmistakable patriarch of a family dynasty that many in Israel have compared to the Kennedys.Mr. Dayan’s wife, Ruth, was the founder of the fashion house Maskit. Their son Assi was an actor and filmmaker. Another son, Ehud, was a sculptor.Ms. Dayan shot to literary stardom at age 20 with “New Face in the Mirror” (1959), an autobiographical novel written in English about a young female soldier whose father is a military commander.“One day my father came to the camp,” she wrote. “He said he was passing and had decided to drop in. He would never have admitted that he had come to see me. His arrival was, of course, an event — an occasion for smart and often unnecessary salutes, for alert and curious eyes. Will he kiss her when he leaves?”The novelist Anzia Yezierska, writing in The New York Times Book Review, called “New Face in the Mirror” “an extraordinary record of the inner life of a rebellious adolescent in search of self-realization.” She added, “There is an honesty and a compulsive intensity in the telling of her story that haunts us, long after finishing the book.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kevin Kwan, Author of ‘Crazy Rich Asians,’ Talks About His New Novel

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      A reader of Kevin Kwan’s books could be forgiven for expecting him to make a grand entrance at lunch in Beverly Hills — in a Lamborghini, perhaps, or wearing a slick pair of shades.Instead, on an unseasonably brisk Tuesday in April, Kwan walked into the private dining at Crustacean with a tentative tilt to his head, as if clearing a low roof. He wore tortoiseshell glasses, a blue cardigan and hair cut for maximum pensive tucking behind ears. Picture David Foster Wallace minus the bandanna.Kwan immediately moved a vase of white roses from one table to another — “Do you mind? So we can see each other?” — then hugged Crustacean’s chef, “the great Helene An,” whose garlic noodles make a cameo in his new book, “Lies and Weddings,” coming out on May 21.To understand Kwan’s reputation for fabulousness, consider his oeuvre. His debut novel, “Crazy Rich Asians,” published in 2013, has sold more than 5 million copies worldwide and been translated into over 40 languages. A Broadway musical is in development. The movie version was the first since “The Joy Luck Club” to feature a majority Asian cast.Kwan’s next three novels covered similar territory: wealthy people behaving decadently and questionably, but usually with heart and always with panache. They were best sellers too. At one point, the “Crazy Rich Asians” trilogy occupied the top three spots on the paperback list, landing Kwan in an elite clique of authors including Colleen Hoover.The Times’s film critic described “Crazy Rich Asians” as “a busy, fizzy movie winnowed from Kevin Kwan’s sprawling, dishy novel.”Sanja Bucko/Warner Bros.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jerome Rothenberg, Who Expanded the Sphere of Poetry, Dies at 92

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      His anthology “Technicians of the Sacred” included a range of non-Western work and was beloved by, among others, rock stars like Jim Morrison and Nick Cave.Jerome Rothenberg, a poet, translator and anthologist whose efforts to bring English-language readers into contact with creative traditions far outside the Western establishment — a field he called ethnopoetics — had an enormous impact on world literature and made him a hero to rock musicians like Nick Cave, Jim Morrison and Warren Zevon, died on April 21 at his home in Encinitas, Calif. He was 92.The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Matthew Rothenberg.By ethnopoetics, Mr. Rothenberg meant poetry from Indigenous and other non-Western cultures, often rendered in ways very different from the strictly textual, including oral, performance, ritual and myth.He introduced the idea in 1967 with his book “Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries From Africa, America, Asia, Europe, and Oceania,” a wide-ranging anthology that introduced readers to ancient Egyptian coronation events, Comanche peyote songs and Gabonese death rites.Mr. Rothenberg’s “Technicians of the Sacred,” first published in 1967 and later reissued twice with new material, introduced readers to ancient Egyptian coronation events, Comanche peyote songs and Gabonese death rites.University of California PressSuch work, he said, was just as complex and vibrant as the Western canon, if not more so. He went on to deepen his argument across scores of books, many of them anthologies, in which he wove together different traditions — Jewish mysticism, American Indian, Dada — and then connected and contextualized them with extensive commentary.“I’ve expanded my searches into forms of poetry that have been hidden from our view but have much to teach us about the sources and resources of poetry that would allow us to fill out the picture,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2017. “I also believe that the new forms of poetry developed by our own experimental poets can allow us to see a greater range of poetry in places and cultures distant from us.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      C.J. Sansom, Mystery Novelist Drawn to Tudor England, Dies at 71

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      He wrote a popular series of books revolving around a hunchbacked detective, Shardlake, whose troubles echo the author’s experiences of childhood bullying.“Oh, goody! An 800-page novel about the peasant uprisings of 1549!” Marilyn Stasio, the longtime mystery and crime reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, began a column in 2019.It was an assessment of “Tombland,” the seventh work of historical fiction by C.J. Sansom to feature Matthew Shardlake, a hunchbacked lawyer-turned-detective whose exploits solving chilling murders in Tudor England come steeped in suspense and granular historical detail. Readers are made privy to the court intrigues of Thomas Cromwell and King Henry VIII, eavesdrop on women arguing in a market stall, and inhale the stench of London streets.Ms. Stasio’s enthusiasm was real, not snarky. “Sansom describes 16th-century events in the crisply realistic style of someone watching them transpire right outside his window,” she wrote.Mr. Sansom, who earned a Ph.D. in history and a law degree before turning to writing in his late 40s, quickly becoming one of Britain’s most popular historical novelists, died of cancer in hospice care on April 27. He was 71.His death was announced by his publisher, Pan Macmillan, which did not say where he died. In 2012, Mr. Sansom disclosed that he had multiple myeloma, a blood cancer, but said it was in remission after treatment. The disease returned during his work on “Tombland,” forcing him to quit writing for six months. He eventually resumed working two hours a day and finished the book, his last to be published.“Sansom describes 16th-century events in the crisply realistic style of someone watching them transpire right outside his window,” a Times critic wrote in 2019 in reviewing Mr. Sansom’s seventh Shardlake novel. Mulholland BooksWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Paul Auster’s Best Books: A Guide

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      The novelist played with reality and chance in tales of solitary narrators and mutable identities. Here’s an overview of his work.Paul Auster, who died on April 30 at the age of 77, was an atmospheric author whose scalpel-sharp prose examined the fluidity of identity and the absurdity of the writer’s life. An occasional memoirist, essayist, translator, poet and screenwriter, Auster was best known for his metafiction — books that were characterized by their elusive narrators, chance encounters and labyrinthine narratives.Consuming Auster’s genre-defying books is not unlike the experience of reading he describes in “The Brooklyn Follies”: “When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear,” he wrote. “For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.” Thankfully, Auster left us with many worlds and stories and realities to lose ourselves in.These are the books that best represent his work.The Invention of Solitude (1982)Auster’s debut memoir, “The Invention of Solitude,” put him on the map as an exciting new voice in the literary world. Bold and inventive, it chronicles his life as the son of an absent father and the father of a young son. The book’s themes — grief, loss, identity, loneliness, coincidence — all became central in his later work, both fiction and nonfiction.The New York Trilogy (1987)This book is technically a triptych of novels (“City of Glass,” “Ghosts” and “The Locked Room”), each of which borrows elements from detective fiction by focusing on a man investigating a subject to the point of oblivion. But at its core, “The New York Trilogy” — likely his most popular work among academics, undergraduates and aspiring writers — is a meditation on the things that make a person who they are. It cemented Auster as a stylish writer, one whose distinctive narrators searched for meaning and identity, circuitously and in perpetuity, against the constraints of art and language.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      PEN America Has Stood By Authors. They Should Stand By PEN.

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      All strong institutions stand to benefit from internal dissent and external pressures. But too often, recent efforts to reform institutions have meant reconstituting them in ways that distort or fundamentally undermine their core mission.Nonprofit organizations, governmental agencies, university departments and cultural institutions have ousted leaders and sent their staffs into turmoil in pursuit of progressive political goals. In the wake of the 2016 election and the 2020 murder of George Floyd and in a rush to apply sweeping “In this house we believe” standards unilaterally, organizations have risked overt politicization, mission drift, irrelevance and even dissolution. And now the war in Gaza is ripping its way across American universities.The latest target is PEN America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to free expression by journalists and authors. Last week, after an increasingly aggressive boycott campaign by some of its members, PEN canceled its annual World Voices Festival, which was conceived by Salman Rushdie and was to mark its 20th anniversary in May. This followed a refusal by several writers to have their work considered for PEN’s annual literary awards. The ceremony awarding those prizes was also canceled.An open letter sent to PEN America’s board and trustees and republished on Literary Hub, now the de facto clearinghouse for pro-Palestinian literary-world sentiment, accused the organization of “implicit support of the Israeli occupation” and of “aiding and abetting genocide.” It demanded the resignation of PEN’s longtime C.E.O., Suzanne Nossel, and current president, Jennifer Finney Boylan. According to its 21 signatories, mostly up-and-coming authors, “among writers of conscience, there is no disagreement. There is fact and fiction. The fact is that Israel is leading a genocide of the Palestinian people.”In response and in keeping with its mission of independence and free expression, PEN America accepted the writers’ willingness to voice their conscience. It has also made clear that there is room for more than one point of view on what constitutes genocide and on the current conflict in Gaza.“As an organization open to all writers, we see no alternative but to remain home to this diversity of opinions and perspectives, even if, for some, that very openness becomes reason to exit,” PEN America stated in an open letter to its community.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Pennsylvania School Board Reinstates Gay Author’s Speech Amid Backlash

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      The Cumberland Valley School Board reversed its decision to cancel Maulik Pancholy’s speech at a middle school next month after many community members said the actor had been discriminated against because of his sexuality.Less than two weeks after a Pennsylvania school board unanimously voted to cancel a gay author’s anti-bullying speech at a middle school, the board voted Wednesday night to reverse its decision and reinstate the event amid pressure from parents, students and administrators.The 5-to-4 vote by the Cumberland Valley School District’s board came in front of scores of community members who packed a high school auditorium and, for several hours, chastised the board for having canceled the event featuring the actor and author Maulik Pancholy over what they said were homophobic concerns.Many who spoke rejected the contention by some board members that Mr. Pancholy’s speech had been canceled over concerns about what they called his “political activism.”“To claim that Maulik Pancholy is a political activist and use that as a justification to cancel his event is an excuse that the public sees through,” one person told the board.Mr. Pauncholy, who acted on “30 Rock” and voiced Baljeet in the cartoon “Phineas and Ferb,” has written children’s books that include gay characters who confront bullying and discrimination and is often a speaker at school events. He had been scheduled to speak at an assembly on May 22 at Mountain View Middle School in Mechanicsburg, a community of about 9,000 people roughly 100 miles west of Philadelphia.On Wednesday night, two board members, Bud Shaffner and Kelly Potteiger, apologized in opening statements for their comments about Mr. Pancholy’s “lifestyle” but maintained that he is a political activist.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More