Hear Peter Read from his Songs
Photos of Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau by Becky Garrison.
At last night’s Heretical Hanukkah Party (or whatever you want to call it), we had the chance to celebrate KtB co-founder Peter Manseau’s trifecta of Jewish book award wins for his new novel, Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter. He read a few pages from the book after an introduction by his fellow founder Jeff Sharlet. Take a listen.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Download [14:25, 6.6 MB]
| Write a letter to the editors | Give back to KtB
Peter Manseau is the author of Songs for the Butcher's Daughter, Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son and, most recently, Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World's Holy Dead. He founded Killing the Buddha with Jeff Sharlet, and the two wrote Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible.
December 15th, 2009 at 4:58 am
I just read “Songs for the Butchers Daughter.” I really enjoyed it. I thought that the “translations” from Yiddish to English of the character Malpesh’s work were truly brilliant. The story really made me think about how easily a language could be made obscure, it could very well only take a couple generations. I know from personal experience that when the law office that I worked for needed a translator for Aramaic that I had to call around to several companies, and even then we had to fly someone to L.A. from the East Coast. I wonder how many people today continue to speak and read Yiddish.