Temim Fruchter
“I also believe that synchronicities are everywhere and echoes are everywhere and for me at least, this is a function of a worldview that encompasses both queer possibility and the sort of Jewish mystical outlook I was raised with. Those things feel even more possible to play with in fiction.”
“Temim Fruchter’s City of Laughter is deeply ambitious, deeply fun, queer mythological storytelling at its finest. A powerful, profound, beautifully-told and thought-provoking debut.”
“[A] brainy and richly textured debut . . . Bringing a queer sensibility and a deep understanding of Modern Orthodox Jewish tradition to novel writing, Fruchter asks whether finding comfort in mystery is a viable alternative to standard happy endings or bleak fates. ‘City of Laughter’ argues that flouting convention makes space for more authentic, expansive stories and more authentic, expansive lives . . . In this book, a new generation accepts the complicated lacunae of history; what they can’t abide is silence and obstruction.”
“A wondrous intergenerational story of queerness and Jewish folklore . . . Fruchter draws on folk tales both real and imagined to create a tender and unforgettable portrait of Jewish culture, faith, and community. This dazzling and hopeful novel is not to be missed.”
Temim Fruchter is a queer nonbinary anti-Zionist Jewish writer who lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her debut novel is City of Laughter (Grove Press, 2024), a New York Times Editor’s Choice that Publisher’s Weekly called “dazzling.” She has received first prize in short fiction from both American Literary Review and New South.
In an interview with the Washington Independent, she was asked how time functioned in the novel: “In writing this novel, I was thinking a lot about the different ways that time can be forgiving, elastic, or nonlinear. With my friends, I often talk about the idea of queer time. Queer time can mean a lot of things, I think — from the idea that many queer people operate on a non-heteronormative timeline, to the idea that certain expectations about temporality and particular milestones are different, and even to the idea that there is some magic in insisting that time need not be rigid or linear but can move with and about us. I thought about time in this book sort of like layers — like instead of past and present, everything is sort of happening at once, it just depends which frequency you’re tuned into. And when I read about this theory, it seemed like a logic the story wanted.”
She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland, and is the recipient of fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Vermont Studio Center, and a 2020 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award. She is co-host of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn.
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(c) Leah James
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