Mark Mirsky is a miracle worker. He has the tears of comedy, the laughter of tragedy, and the speaking voice of life-all in a stylization that lets us know instantly we are in the presence of a great teller of tales. I hope never to miss a word he writes. John Ciardi Mark Jay Mirsky's first novel Thou Worm Jacob was a best seller in Boston. His second novel about the streets of Dorchester, Roxbury and Mattapan, Blue Hill Avenue, was "New and Recommended" in The New York Times. Boston.com listed it together with the work of Melville, Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, as one of the "100 Essential Books" about New England. In Puddingstone, Mark Jay Mirsky has concocted a hot "pudding" out of the simmering racial and ethnic animosities in the city of Boston throughout the 1960s, '70s and '80s. Centered in the districts around its historic Franklin Park, where the retreat of glacial ice left fused puddingstone as the characteristic rock, Jews, Irish, African Americans, Yankee bankers, and the last of its native Ponkapoag Indians join in a general assault on the civic peace; Boston's cardinal and mayor are dunked in the pudding. Puddingstone's events are filtered through the story of a Hebrew-school dropout, Maishe Ostropol, who returns to Boston's suburbs as a popular Reform rabbi advocating new religious practices. The rabbi throws his congregation into turmoil then disappears on a tour of Jewish sites in Europe with its Sisterhood. When Maishe mysteriously finds his way back to his childhood neighborhood on Blue Hill Avenue and disappears into Franklin Park, the city of Boston begins to shake with the birth pangs of utopia.
About the Author: Mark Jay Mirsky was born in Boston and grew up in the Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury district that borders Franklin Park to the east, north and south. Attending Boston Public Latin, Harvard College and Stanford University, Mr. Mirsky has previously published four novels, Thou Worm Jacob, Proceedings of the Rabble, Blue Hill Avenue, The Red Adam, a collection of short stories, The Secret Table, and several books of criticism, My Search for the Messiah, Dante, Eros and Kabbalah, The Absent Shakespeare, and his latest, The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets, A Satire to Decay, He is the co-editor of Rabbinic Fantasies (Yale University Press) The Jews of Pinsk Volumes 1 & 2, (Stanford University Press) and the editor of Robert Musil's Diaries in English (Basic Books). He founded the journal Fiction in 1972 with Donald Barthelme, Jane DeLynn and Max and Marianne Frisch and has been its editor-in-chief up to the present. Professor of English at The City College of New York, he has served as its chairperson and Director of Jewish Studies. His reviews and articles on architecture and literature have appeared in The New York Sunday Times, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, The Massachusetts Review, Partisan Review, The Progressive, Haaretz, and numerous other publications. His play Mother Hubbard's Cupboard was performed at the Fringe Festival in 2007 and can be found on the www.indietheaternow.com An Autobiographical essay published in 1999 on Mark Jay Mirsky can be found in Volume 30 of Contemporary Authors, Gale and a chapter is dedicated to him in Jules Chametzky's volume, Out of Brownsville. He is about to issue a novel about Boston lost in the 1950's, called Franklin Park Puddingstone as an e-book. His articles appear on the Fiction Website, Fictioninc.com and a blog, markmirsky.com