Posted on December 31, 2007 by Steve Pollak
For this month's roundup of Jewish bestsellers, I discovered another category in Amazon, "Jewish American." It's listed under World Literature and then under the United States subcategory.
It was in that category that I came across my biggest surprise of the year. I hadn't realized how well Amy Bloom's "Away
," had been selling on Amazon but the book ranks higher in sales than Philip Roth's "Exit Ghost
."
All of the results below are as of this morning. Amazon says they update the bestselling results each hour but I don't know anything more about their methodology. As always, there are some strange titles included in the Jewish categories, including Hamlet, which is listed among the books in Jewish World Literature, and a book by a Christian minister, which is listed under Judaism in Amazon's Religion and Spirituality category.
For whatever reason, neither Philip Roth nor Michael Chabon are listed in any of the Jewish categories I found even though they would both qualify as glatt kosher in the world of Jewish writers.
So, I did some individual searches to see how some of the books we discussed over the last year did have been doing on Amazon. Here are the results of my own searches:
"The Yiddish Policemen's Union
," by Michael Chabon ranked #116 in Books
"Away: A Novel," by Amy Bloom ranked #287 in Books
"Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure
," by Michael Chabon ranked #503 in Books
"Exit Ghost," by Philip Roth ranked #1,052 in Books
"Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir
," by Shalom Auslander ranked #1,629 in Books
"The Septembers of Shiraz
," by Dalia Sofer ranked #2,260 in Books
"The Ministry of Special Cases
," by Nathan Englander ranked #4,764 in Books
"The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
," by Lucette Lagnado ranked #6,046 in Books
"Jews and Power
," by Ruth R. Wisse ranked #6,682 in Books
"The Saturday Wife
," by Naomi Ragen ranked #26,575 in Books
"The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492
," by Peter Cole (translator) ranked #73,782 in Books
Here are the results of the Amazon category listings sorted according to ‘bestselling’:
Top Ten under Literature and Fiction > World Literature > United States > Jewish American
1. Away: A Novel by Amy Bloom (Hardcover - Aug 21, 2007)
2. Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum (Hardcover - April 5, 2004)
3. Rashi's Daughters, Book II: Miriam by Maggie Anton (Paperback - Jul 31, 2007)
4. Kabbalah: A Love Story by Lawrence Rabbi Kushner (Paperback - Oct 9, 2007)
5. Beware of God: Stories by Shalom Auslander (Paperback - Mar 28, 2006)
6. Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska and Alice Kessler-Harris (Paperback - May 1999)
7. Dawn by Elie Wiesel and Frances Frenaye (Paperback - Mar 21, 2006)
8. Women's Minyan by Naomi Ragen (Paperback - Mar 2006)
9. Caspian Rain by Gina Nahai (Hardcover - Sep 14, 2007)
10. Day: A Novel by Elie Wiesel and Anne Borchardt (Paperback - Mar 21, 2006)
Top Ten under Literature and Fiction > World Literature > Jewish
1. A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz and Nicholas de Lange (Paperback - Nov 1, 2005)
2. Hamlet (Shakespeare in Production) by William Shakespeare and Robert Hapgood (Hardcover - May 28, 1999)
3. Haiku U: From Aristotle to Zola, 100 Great Books in 17 Syllables by David M. Bader (Hardcover - Mar 31, 2005)
4. Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life by Philip Davis (Hardcover - Sep 7, 2007)
5. The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492 (Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation) by Peter Cole (Paperback - Jan 2, 2007)
6. Disguised As Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, And the Creation of the Superhero by Danny Fingeroth and Stan Lee (Hardcover - Oct 22, 2007)
7. All Rivers Run to the Sea: Memoirs by Elie Wiesel (Hardcover - 1995)
8. Literary Murder by Batya Gur and Dalya Bilu (Hardcover - Nov 1993)
9. The Blue Mountain: A Novel by Meir Shalev (Hardcover - Jun 1991)
10. The Saturday Morning Murder: Psychoanalytic Case, A by Batya Gur (Paperback - Nov 30, 1993)
Top Ten under Literature and Fiction > World Literature > Yiddish
1. Tevye the Dairyman and The Railroad Stories (Library of Yiddish Classics) by Sholem Aleichem (Paperback - Oct 1, 1996)
2. Ineffable Name Of God: Poems by Abraham Joshua Heschel and Morton M. Leifman (Hardcover - Dec 2004)
3. The Dybbuk and Other Writings by S. Ansky by S. Ansky, David G. Roskies, and Golda Werman (Paperback - Sep 1, 2002)
4. A Dybbuk and Other Tales of the Supernatural by S. Ansky, Joachim Neugroschel, and Tony Kushner (Paperback - April 1998)
5. A Treasury of Yiddish Stories: Revised and Updated Edition by Irving Howe (Hardcover - Dec 20, 1989)
6. City of Palaces: Poems by Isaac Berliner and Diego Rivera (Hardcover - Jun 1996)
7. The I. L. Peretz Reader by I. L. Peretz and Ruth Wisse (Paperback - Jun 1, 2002)
8. The Meaning of Yiddish (Contraversions: Jews and Other Differen) by Benjamin Harshav (Paperback - Nov 1, 1999)
9. Yiddish Wisdom: Yiddishe Chochma by Kristina Swarner (Hardcover - Jun 1, 1996)
10. Rabbi Nachman's Stories by Aryeh Kaplan (Hardcover - April 1985)
Top Ten under Religion and Spirituality > Judaism
1. How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now by James L. Kugel (Hardcover - Sep 11, 2007)
2. The Secret Power of Speaking God's Word (Meyer, Joyce) by Joyce Meyer (Hardcover - Aug 26, 2004)
3. The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary by Robert Alter (Hardcover - Sep 10, 2007)
4. Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir by Shalom Auslander (Hardcover - Oct 4, 2007)
5. When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Harold S. Kushner (Hardcover - Jan 1, 1987)
6. A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Armstrong, Karen) by Karen Armstrong (Hardcover - Mar 2, 2004)
7. The Jewish Study Bible: featuring The Jewish Publication Society TANAKH Translation by Adele Berlin, Marc Zvi Brettler, and Michael Fishbane (Hardcover - Oct 15, 2003)
8. The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children by Wendy Mogel (Paperback - Oct 30, 2001)
9. The Secret garden: An anthology in the Kabbalah (A Continuum book) (Unknown Binding - 1976)
10. The Biblical World: An Illustrated Atlas by Jean-Pierre Isbouts and Bruce Chilton (Hardcover - Nov 6, 2007)
Top Ten under Biographies and Memoirs > Ethnic and National > Jewish
1. Night (Oprah's Book Club) by Elie Wiesel (Paperback - Jan 16, 2006)
2. Anne Frank Lb by Anne Frank (Hardcover - Oct 3, 1967)
3. Foreskin's Lament: A Memoir by Shalom Auslander (Hardcover - Oct 4, 2007)
4. The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father's Nazi Boyhood by Mark Kurzem (Hardcover - Nov 1, 2007)
5. The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn (Paperback - Aug 21, 2007)
6. The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman (Hardcover - Nov 19, 1996)
7. The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World by Lucette Lagnado (Hardcover - Jun 26, 2007)
8. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (Hardcover - Mar 30, 2000)
9. Churchill and the Jews by Martin Gilbert (Paperback - Jun 24, 2008)
10. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl (Paperback - Jun 15, 2006)
As always, I welcome your comments.