Books
Books
An award-winning essay collection and a novel — available now from independent booksellers and major retailers.
A Kirkus Review Best Indie Book of 2019
This All-at-Onceness
An insider’s odyssey through counter-culturalism, consumerism, and the social surveillance state.
In This All-at-Onceness, Julie Wittes Schlack takes us on a vivid, personal journey through the political and cultural movements that have shaped every generation from the Baby Boomers to the Parkland kids. She examines the unlikely and twisting relationship between idealism and engineering that has promised a future of progress and hope, but only occasionally delivered on it, and asks why. From the civil rights and ant-war movements to the birth of Second Wave feminism, from the wintery ’70s to the shiny rise of corporate culture in the ’80s, from the democratic early days of the Web to today’s social surveillance state, Wittes Schlack tells a story about idealistic energy and how it travels through time.
Personal and political, intimate and informative, bracing and comic, these linked essays take us to an abortion mill in rural Quebec, the Michigan home of numerous UFO sightings, an abandoned Shaker village, the dust-clogged air of garment sweatshops in Allentown, a philanthropic corporate breakfast, and a dystopian market research conference. They ask: Are we at the gates of the digital Promised Land? Or are we exiles wandering in the desert with only tweeting Kardashians for company?
Available from Regal House Publishing, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org, and on order from your local bookstore. You can also read Julie’s interview with JewishBoston.
“An accumulating achievement, a thought-provoking meditation on the way time changes each of us, and technology changes all of us.”
— Jane Brox, author of Silence
More praise
“These essays are smart – intellectually ambitious and unrelentingly perceptive – but what really makes them stand out is how surprisingly beautiful they are, too, if beauty can be understood to encompass humor and wonder and tenderness and ferocity, and a tireless, urgent sense of search.” — Leah Hager Cohen, author of Strangers and Cousins
“A walk on the wild side of the cultural psyche, its chaos of connections. Julie Wittes Schlack has a laser instinct for stories and the sharp, often mordantly funny, details that subtly reveal them. A must read.” — Alexandra Johnson, author of The Hidden Writer
“A thoughtful, witty, and evocative recollection of a life and the convictions that energized it.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
A novel
Burning and Dodging
On the cusp of sixty, after a lifetime of supporting the aspirations of others, would-be artist Tina Gabler is feeling a sense of urgency to take her own ambitions seriously and put her creative talents to the test. Temporarily unattached, Tina takes a position with former prime-time news anchor, Peter Bright at his home in the Thousand Islands. Aging and frail, Peter is trying to finish a book about the decline of objectivity in photojournalism — a meticulously documented exposé of iconic but staged photographs that defined “reality” for an increasingly lazy and credulous public that, Peter believes, demands stories more than facts.
As Peter’s research assistant, Tina tracks down not just the provenance of his photos, but also the unidentified child in a Roman Vishniac photograph and Peter’s estranged daughter, a Cree girl he adopted during the notorious “Sixties Scoop” in Canada. But in trying to create happy endings for other people’s children, she must reexamine her relationship with her own father, and the quest for collective versus personal achievement that has brought her to this unsettled moment.
Funny, searching, and gorgeously written, Burning and Dodging entertains as it reveals how the stories we construct about others support the stories we tell about ourselves. Available from Black Rose Writing, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Bookshop.org, or by order from your local bookstore.
Praise for Burning and Dodging
“A vivid and moving novel by an award-winning writer working with deep reserves of insight, heart, and mind. … Julie Wittes Schlack joins Anne Tyler, Alice Munro, and Colette in exploring the challenges for a single woman facing urgent questions in mid-life.” — James Glickman, author of Crossing Point
“Brimming with philosophical debates, like a marvelous dinner party where every guest is fascinating. Most fascinating of all is Tina, Julie Schlack’s funny, restless, acerbic heroine … an enormously intelligent and compassionate look at how talking and listening create empathy.” — Suzanne Berne, Orange Prize-winning author of The Dogs of Littlefield
“Witty and forthright, luminous and compelling … Captivating and sharply insightful, it’s a novel not to be missed.” — Karla Huebner, author of In Search of the Magic Theater
“An astute and absorbing study of personal growth, human connection, and the nature of reality.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Julie Wittes Schlack’s intoxicating literary novel uses poignant, conversational dialogue to elevate sophisticated discourse on the nature of truth, whether unbiased or not, in journalism and art.” — IndieReader