Shalom Auslander

An essayist determined to defend the virtues of pessimism as Davids Rakoff and Sedaris might, Auslander carries his cynical wit into fiction as well. In Hope: A Tragedy, a book sure to offend and delight, a Jewish family in rural New York struggles to separate themselves from their history. Case in point: The central character’s mother can’t stop reminiscing about concentration camps, in which she was never a prisoner.