Smash­ing the Tablets: Rad­i­cal Retellings of the Hebrew Bible is a bold, new col­lec­tion of twen­ty-three writ­ers’ respons­es to bib­li­cal sto­ries. Through fic­tion, cre­ative non­fic­tion, and poet­ry, these invig­o­rat­ing pieces invite read­ers to recon­sid­er and reflect on sto­ry­telling itself. JBC spoke with the edi­tors of the vol­ume, Sara Lipp­mann and Seth Rogoff, on the ori­gin sto­ry of the project, the sim­i­lar themes that emerged across pieces, the the pow­er of retelling, and more.

Simona Zaret­sky: Smash­ing the Tablets is an excit­ing anthol­o­gy com­posed of twen­ty-three pieces (and a fore­word by Shalom Aus­lan­der) that span time, place, and per­spec­tive. What was the impe­tus for cre­at­ing this collection? 

Seth Rogoff: I have been work­ing with bib­li­cal texts as part of my cre­ative process for many years. Often, I start a nov­el with a few ele­ments in mind, one of which is the basic sce­nario or sit­u­a­tion of the nov­el and anoth­er is a bib­li­cal sto­ry that relates to the idea or sce­nario, often not direct­ly but metaphor­i­cal­ly or alle­gor­i­cal­ly. Dur­ing the writ­ing, I rework the bib­li­cal mate­r­i­al, turn­ing it around, flip­ping it over, try­ing to get a sense of its dimen­sions, its depth. Often the most impor­tant dimen­sions for me become what’s absent, what’s implic­it, and the ten­sions or con­tra­dic­tions in the piece. This has been an inspir­ing way of work­ing, and I thought, yes, the bib­li­cal text is made tru­ly alive in this way. It is organ­ic — shift­ing, chang­ing with each encounter. It has changed for me so much that I can hard­ly dis­tin­guish the orig­i­nal from the lay­ers I have set upon it. When I read the sto­ry of Jacob’s lad­der, a key motif of my nov­el The Kirschbaum Lec­tures, I see not only the short bib­li­cal text but also the many ways I have reimag­ined it. These alter­na­tive read­ings have fused with the ​“orig­i­nal” for me. What would hap­pen, I thought, if I asked writ­ers whose work I love to read and deeply respect to encounter a bib­li­cal text of their choice with the intent to explore it? 

This process could be done with any text, real­ly, but doing it with the Bible, for me, has a broad­er spir­i­tu­al dimen­sion. I am search­ing for a rela­tion­ship between the human and the divine built on foun­da­tion­al val­ues such as egal­i­tar­i­an­ism, gen­eros­i­ty, care, and peace, ones that reject vio­lence, hier­ar­chy, and author­i­tar­i­an­ism. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the val­ues of hier­ar­chy, trib­al­ism, and author­i­tar­i­an­ism (big and small) dom­i­nate today’s reli­gious cul­ture. At present, pow­er­ful Jew­ish fac­tions are espous­ing a vio­lent, author­i­tar­i­an ide­ol­o­gy. This is not my Judaism, and I am not pre­pared to renounce my Judaism entire­ly because oth­ers choose to ​“prac­tice” it in these ways. If we want a dif­fer­ent Judaism, we need to build alter­na­tive foun­da­tions. Can we find a faith that’s good, that’s just, that’s uni­ver­sal? I think about the encounter between God and David in Sec­ond Samuel after David takes pos­ses­sion of the wife of Uri­ah the Hit­tite. God tells David a para­ble of a rich and poor man, how a rich man takes the one and only lamb from the poor man to feed a trav­el­er, instead of tak­ing from his own flock. David, enraged, calls for the rich man’s death. God responds, ​“That man is you!” If the entire­ty of Judaism was this one moment, I would be the most fer­vent believ­er. How opposed is our cur­rent soci­ety, and our cur­rent Judaism, to this sen­ti­ment! There are Jews today who would not only cel­e­brate the steal­ing and killing of the lamb but would say that’s not enough, the poor man him­self should also be destroyed. 

Sara Lipp­mann: When Seth first approached me, I balked. Who, me? I’m no Torah schol­ar. I was a Hebrew school delin­quent. But as we spoke, I began to under­stand that my knee-jerk impulse – to leave it to the ​“experts” – was pre­cise­ly what he was push­ing against. The whole idea of the project was to remove the Torah from its lofty pil­lar, from its realm among the strict inter­pre­ta­tion­ists and to invite all of us in. I real­ized part of my whole rebel­lion could be attrib­uted to an anger and resent­ment at hav­ing been raised with this nar­row mes­sag­ing, that I was some­how not wor­thy, even though I’d been sub­ject­ed to these sto­ries my whole life. Ever since I was lit­tle, I’ve been pissed off by an assumed pas­siv­i­ty and emp­ty com­pli­ance with reli­gion and rit­u­al, dis­sat­is­fied with rote author­i­ta­tive answers to my ques­tions: ​“Because it is writ­ten.” And yet, iron­i­cal­ly, in my twen­ties, I spent months read­ing the Tanakh in my own self-imposed lit­er­ary inquiry. I real­ized that this inher­ent blend of curios­i­ty and resis­tance to the sta­tus quo made me a prime can­di­date for the project.

SR: I’d just like to briefly add that even though I approached Sara with the ini­tial con­cep­tion, it con­tin­u­al­ly evolved dur­ing the years we worked on it togeth­er. The process was such a reward­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion, and I learned so much from Sara. 

SZ: What was the process like of putting this col­lec­tion together?

SR: The spir­it of rad­i­cal­ism guid­ed the deci­sion-mak­ing. I felt that rather than impose a notion of ​“rad­i­cal­ism” on authors, it was more rad­i­cal, and more appro­pri­ate, to pro­vide the space for authors to inter­pret this con­cept for them­selves. Sara and I want­ed to cov­er diverse parts of the bib­li­cal text and avoid redun­dan­cy, but oth­er­wise we gave authors room for explo­ration. Impor­tant to our process was find­ing a wide range of voic­es and per­spec­tives, and I think we achieved this. The col­lec­tion is not a man­i­festo from a sin­gle ide­o­log­i­cal or inter­pre­tive view­point. In many ways it is a cacoph­o­ny, but often the deep­est rhythms are found beneath such noise, if we have the patience to dis­en­tan­gle it. 

SL: I felt deeply com­mit­ted to bring­ing in as many dif­fer­ent writ­ers, from as many dif­fer­ent back­grounds and dif­fer­ent stages in their careers as we could. Obvi­ous­ly, we were lim­it­ed by space, time, and word count, and so in many ways this vol­ume bare­ly scratch­es the sur­face, but it was real­ly impor­tant to me to look beyond the cis, Ashke­nazi, mid-life Brook­lyn writer (to whom I mean no shade!) and to inten­tion­al­ly broad­en our scope in the spir­it of het­ero­doxy. Once we had a core list of con­trib­u­tors, we were able to take the project out on pro­pos­al. After SUNY Press signed on, that list con­tin­ued to grow. This is my first col­lab­o­ra­tion, and my first time edit­ing an anthol­o­gy, so there was a lot to learn and jug­gle, but it was incred­i­bly reward­ing to get to work with and be nour­ished by so many tal­ent­ed writ­ers. With Seth in Prague and me in Brook­lyn, there could be a nat­ur­al lag in our com­mu­ni­ca­tion, which per­haps ran at odds with how accus­tomed we’ve become to rapid fire respons­es, but there was some­thing fit­ting about the pace, how it encour­aged its own thought­ful­ness and cre­ativ­i­ty. Patience is an over­looked gift. We met reg­u­lar­ly on Zoom through­out the years-long process, often as my day was start­ing and his was end­ing – and those con­ver­sa­tions always left me ener­gized and buzzing with new ideas.

SZ: The book begins with Shalom Auslander’s humor­ous and insight­ful dis­sec­tion of bib­li­cal sto­ry­telling. This piece asks read­ers to con­front bib­li­cal sto­ry­telling, as a tool for teach­ing chil­dren, but real­ly also as a way of liv­ing. How did you approach the frame­work for this col­lec­tion? Were there any chal­lenges or unex­pect­ed insights?

SL: I don’t know that we envi­sioned it as a ​“tool” for any­thing – liv­ing or teach­ing – but more as an invi­ta­tion for active engage­ment. That is, instead of protest­ing via dis­missal or turn­ing away, the protest can flour­ish inside the con­ver­sa­tion… and not mere­ly inside of it, but explode and expand it. While I do believe there is plen­ty to learn from the inno­v­a­tive and coura­geous ways these writ­ers approached their mate­r­i­al, try­ing on and slough­ing off, invert­ing or reimag­in­ing and oth­er­wise mak­ing their own, it’s hard­ly an instruc­tion man­u­al. To the con­trary, the pieces mere­ly hold up a mir­ror, and per­haps encour­age us to peer deep­er into our fal­li­ble, vul­ner­a­ble selves, to embrace and not cast off any part of the very messy stuff that makes us human.

In terms of chal­lenges and insights, one thing we began to real­ize as the anthol­o­gy took shape was its nat­ur­al lop­sid­ed­ness. It’s Gen­e­sis heavy, for good rea­son: the first book of Moses con­tains some of the most wide­ly read and most nar­ra­tive sto­ries, and also is rife with dra­ma. Expul­sion! Floods! Near human sac­ri­fice! Many of these tales are already cement­ed in the col­lec­tive con­scious­ness. I don’t think we have any­thing from Leviti­cus, Num­bers, or Deuteron­o­my. On the one hand, this could be seen as a glar­ing gap, but on the oth­er hand, a gap­ing hole in our anthol­o­gy feels con­sis­tent with oth­er Bib­li­cal gaps. We had no pre­tense about cre­at­ing some­thing ​“whole.” The uneven­ness feels inte­gral. As we began to order the col­lec­tion, we were faced with the chal­lenge of how to clear­ly show the new pieces in con­ver­sa­tion with the old? That’s when we came up with the idea to assign an epi­graph to each. What salient line from the text most res­onates? Seth and I split up the task and then reviewed them, and here’s where we dis­cov­ered anoth­er fun chal­lenge – we were not work­ing off the same edi­tion of the Tanakh, which meant there were minor vari­a­tions in the trans­la­tions, so we had to go back and agree upon a ver­sion, and then smooth things out for con­sis­ten­cy, which was a choice, but which again only under­scores the fact that noth­ing is absolute.

SZ: In the intro­duc­tion, you invoke the idea of ​“the pow­er of cre­ative read­ing.” This is such a strik­ing idea, could you speak a bit more about it and how you see it at play in Jew­ish sto­ry­telling today?

SR: This is a notion I feel quite strong­ly about, main­ly because I think cre­ative read­ing is an endan­gered prac­tice. Most of us are aware that read­ing is in steep decline in today’s soci­ety, and has been in decline for a long time. Increas­ing­ly, our edu­ca­tion­al sys­tems pri­or­i­tize instru­men­tal read­ing, read­ing to gain infor­ma­tion­al con­tent. The lazi­est and most prob­lem­at­ic type of read­ing is what’s done in what we call ​“social media.” This is a type of read­ing that has very lit­tle to do with what we called read­ing in the past. Instead, it is an activ­i­ty meant to gen­er­ate a quick emo­tion­al impres­sion, which then fades, replaced by the next. Mean­ing is decon­tex­tu­al­ized, even though con­text itself becomes gener­ic and uni­ver­sal­ized. The more super­fi­cial the text is, the bet­ter. Cre­ative read­ing is fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent. It is a gen­er­a­tive process, and in my view an artis­tic prac­tice. It takes the text as mate­r­i­al; it adds labor or work; it com­bines the text with oth­er mate­ri­als. It cre­ates struc­tures of inter­pre­ta­tion and mean­ing. These struc­tures might col­lapse imme­di­ate­ly, replaced by new ones. They might be con­stant­ly reshaped. The process takes time, requires com­mit­ment, requires open­ness, cre­ative engage­ment, intel­lec­tu­al and cre­ative flex­i­bil­i­ty, patience, respect for the text, for the text as ​“oth­er,” respect for the self, for the process of self-cre­ation, self-decre­ation, the flux of the self as it absorbs and reshapes that which is beyond its ten­u­ous bor­ders. Cre­ative read­ing is a process that push­es back against sim­pli­fi­ca­tion, against the divi­sions of inside and out­side, self and oth­er, us and them. It desires depth and rejects super­fi­cial­i­ty. For me, cre­ative read­ing is a way of life, not only a strat­e­gy to read and write, though I feel I can actu­al­ize this prac­tice best when work­ing on a nov­el. The nov­el writ­ing process becomes a mode of read­ing, and I think that’s why, despite the oth­er­wise prac­ti­cal use­less­ness of a nov­el and its root­ed­ness in a kind of bour­geois reac­tionary cul­ture, I still love it. Writ­ing-as-cre­ative-read­ing has, for me, an ethics, which are ground­ed in what I find best in human­ism. In terms of its rela­tion­ship to Jew­ish sto­ry­telling, I find it vital. In a world gov­erned main­ly by closed mean­ing and dog­ma, a world in which read­ing is instru­men­tal­ized for the pur­pos­es of divi­sion and dom­i­na­tion, for the pur­pos­es of rigid iden­ti­ty for­ma­tion and a closed sense of self, a world which is spi­ral­ing into cat­a­stro­phe, what do we need more than this? Jews have been some of the most cre­ative read­ers in world his­to­ry, and as this anthol­o­gy indi­cates, some still are. In this regard, two pieces in the anthol­o­gy that keep com­ing back to me over the last years are Michael Zapata’s loose response to the flood nar­ra­tive and Rose­bud Ben-Oni’s vision of a dark and decay­ing Eden. Ben-Oni’s world, apoc­a­lyp­tic and bru­tal, feels like one of the most accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tions of today’s real­i­ty I have encountered. 

SZ: Ever-shift­ing pow­er dynam­ics are present in so many of the pieces. It shows up in inter­per­son­al rela­tion­ships, between indi­vid­u­als and soci­etal forces, and at times in spir­i­tu­al aspects where the fig­ure of God wields near com­plete pow­er. Could you explore this tension?

SR: The issue of pow­er is at the heart of the Bible. The cre­ation sto­ry is, in a sense, the begin­ning of a pow­er strug­gle between God and human beings. In the typ­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion, the Hebrew God dif­fers from the non-Hebrew gods in God’s omnipo­tence. There is no ques­tion about God’s author­i­ty. God’s reign is absolute. And yet, the text is full of slip­pages, moments of ambi­gu­i­ty, fear, and ques­tion­ing of God’s pow­er. In my view, the accep­tance (and cel­e­bra­tion) of the absolute author­i­ty of God over human beings cre­ates a hier­ar­chi­cal­ly orga­nized reli­gion, which sup­ports social hier­ar­chy. On the oth­er hand, if we don’t accept the basic ​“orig­i­nal” hier­ar­chy and instead start to probe the ten­sions and fis­sures in these rela­tion­ships, we can unearth more rad­i­cal, anar­chic sen­si­bil­i­ties. The exis­tence of these sen­si­bil­i­ties in the text indi­cates that the can­on­ized bible is not a closed text. The Bible con­tains ideas about hier­ar­chi­cal and author­i­tar­i­an pow­er, but it also con­tains their nega­tion. It is up to us to decide what ideas and val­ues mat­ter. We can rewrite the entire Bible from this van­tage point, and it will be just as real as the cur­rent­ly can­on­ized ver­sion. We can all play the role of the prophet Ezra. 

SL: Rab­bi Sharon Brous recent­ly said that ​“our agency is our most sacred inher­i­tance” – and that sounds about right to me. Chalk­ing it all up to divine will absolves the self of respon­si­bil­i­ty, there­by cre­at­ing a vac­u­um for pow­er grab­bing and cor­rup­tion. The mere notion of God’s degree has dan­ger­ous and vio­lent impli­ca­tions, which we can­not afford, not ever, and cer­tain­ly not now. It seems we always have a choice: to be kind, to be lov­ing, to act, to look beyond the bound­ary. Most of the pieces embrace the func­tion of choice as they revis­it dynam­ics between mor­tals: father and son, daugh­ters and father, wife and sur­ro­gate, rab­bi and pupil, lover and king, etc.

SZ: Seth, in your piece, ​“Cain and Abel,” the char­ac­ter of God is vil­lain­ous, tak­ing out ire on an unwit­ting, devout Cain. Cain shuf­fles between cities, always the scape­goat with no hope for jus­tice. I was struck by the deep sad­ness of Cain being unable to go home and mourn his broth­er’s death with his fam­i­ly. What were your influ­ences in por­tray­ing God and Cain in this way?

SR: Cain has always fas­ci­nat­ed me from the time I was a young boy in Hebrew school. Then, and now, I could nev­er under­stand why he would have killed his broth­er. I mean, I have two broth­ers, and even though I often felt a cer­tain way about them, I nev­er had the urge to mur­der either of them. To believe in the sto­ry, one has to believe in a kind of inher­ent evil in Cain rather than a ​“moti­va­tion.” There is an implied moti­va­tion, but for me this only high­lights the lack of moti­va­tion. Also, as a boy, I felt con­nect­ed to Cain’s pun­ish­ment, his root­less­ness, his wan­der­ing, his invul­ner­a­ble vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty. In this sto­ry in the anthol­o­gy, which is a small frag­ment from my nov­el The Cas­tle, I want­ed to imag­ine a dif­fer­ent Cain. And to imag­ine a dif­fer­ent Cain meant to imag­ine a dif­fer­ent God, and a dif­fer­ent rela­tion­ship between them. What’s strik­ing in the first pages of Gen­e­sis is the amount of con­flict between peo­ple and God. Adam and Eve, of course, famous­ly dis­obey and vio­late God’s rules. God enforces the strict divi­sion between humans and the divine by deny­ing Adam and Eve access to the Tree of Life, thus immor­tal­i­ty. God then ban­ish­es the pair from Eden and cre­ates the world’s first ter­ri­to­r­i­al bor­der. Cain becomes, then, the orig­i­nal tres­pass­er, the orig­i­nal stranger, the fore­fa­ther of the nomad, the wan­der­er, the migrant, the immi­grant, the out­sider. As such, he is the arche­typ­al dis­rup­tive force. He enters a social sys­tem and by his mere pres­ence shifts that sys­tem. This is the Cain I dis­cov­ered through Kafka’s nov­el The Cas­tle. And my nov­el of the same name is part­ly an imag­in­ing of Kafka’s K. as Cain (or in Ger­man Kain). Whether he knows it or not, my Cain is an anar­chic force, con­tain­ing the pre-cre­ation chaot­ic force of the watery ​“deep.” Cre­ation means author­i­ty and hier­ar­chy; chaos means equal­i­ty and free­dom, free­dom pri­mar­i­ly from our rigid sense of self. 

SZ: As you men­tion in the intro­duc­tion, many of the pieces focus on nar­ra­tive gaps or fig­ures who were pre­vi­ous­ly name­less. Were there any fig­ures you want­ed to ensure were high­light­ed in a con­tem­po­rary inter­pre­ta­tion? Were there any pieces that sur­prised you? 

SL: It was fas­ci­nat­ing to see which sto­ries were pounced on right away, and which sto­ries were left un-retold. For exam­ple, I thought for sure some­one would snatch up Jon­ah and his famous pre­pos­ter­ous fish, but no dice. While we do have Moriel Roth­man-Zecher’s beau­ti­ful take on Jacob wrestling the angel – at a queer night­club – no one explored Jacob and Esau and the clas­sic case of the stolen birthright, which shocked me. Joseph, too, is notice­ably absent. Instead of the sto­ry of Joseph’s dreams, how­ev­er, we have Sarah Blake’s fero­cious first-per­son sto­ry of his half-sis­ter, Dinah, rag­ing front and cen­ter, which feels com­plete­ly in line with our mis­sion. Which is to say, in think­ing through this ques­tion, it feels com­plete­ly in line with our project that so many of the more icon­ic sto­ries one might expect to see were side­lined to make room for less­er known tales or char­ac­ters, par­tic­u­lar­ly female char­ac­ters, that receive only a pass­ing men­tion, if that, in the orig­i­nal text. I’m grate­ful for eri­ca rid­dick­’s cen­ter­ing of over­looked matri­archs Bil­hah and Zil­pah. And who was Jepthah’s daugh­ter, any­way? That’s what this was all about.

So many pieces sur­prised us in excit­ing and chal­leng­ing ways, which was one of the most delight­ful aspects of the process. When a new piece arrived in our inbox, it was like pluck­ing a ​“sur­prise” toy from the grab bag bin! We did­n’t know what to expect! I’d nev­er heard of the Witch of Endor! And I did­n’t have the Book of Job recast as a Pitts­burgh soror­i­ty sis­ter on my bib­li­cal Bin­go card, but the bril­liant and hilar­i­ous Steve Almond sure did! We often say that great writ­ing embod­ies ele­ments both star­tling and true, and Elisa Albert’s dead-on com­par­i­son of Insta­gram to the gold­en calf, and Max Gross’ fash­ion­ing Haman in the pet­ty body of a sub­ur­ban New Jer­sey rab­bi nailed those notes. Michael David Lukas’ gen­er­ous grap­pling with fraught ques­tions of lega­cy, iden­ti­ty, pos­si­bil­i­ty, and inher­i­tance, gift­ed us with the per­fect end­ing we did­n’t know we needed.

SZ: Addi­tion­al­ly, the pow­er of nam­ing and cre­ation seem to go hand in hand. In this col­lec­tion, we see char­ac­ters take on names or leave them behind, just as selves are shed or mold­ed. How do you see nam­ing oper­at­ing here, espe­cial­ly when it is out­side the con­ven­tion­al telling of God doing so?

SL: From an edi­to­r­i­al stand­point, it was wild to see so many con­trib­u­tors nat­u­ral­ly grav­i­tat­ing to the theme of nam­ing and its implicit/​explicit pow­er. True to our project, there is no uni­form con­sen­sus. Eri­ka Drei­fus’s deci­sion to pre­serve Jepthah’s daugh­ter anonymi­ty infused it with a qui­et, sub­ver­sive pow­er, under­scored by the haunt­ing, unnamed choral female point-of-view. By con­trast, Ilana Masad, in her erot­ic trans­la­tion of the book of Ruth, ascribed deep­er, dou­ble mean­ing to the cen­tral play­ers by pre­sent­ing Ruth as Root and Nao­mi as Pleas­ant­ly. Mean­while, in retelling the sto­ry of Dinah, Sarah Blake choos­es to under­score the inequity of pow­er – and to rec­ti­fy the fact that Dinah’s name receives only pass­ing men­tion – by replac­ing the stat­ed name of her rapist, Shechem, with Dinah Dinah Dinah to furi­ous effect.

SZ: What are you read­ing and writ­ing now?

SR: I just fin­ished Tomáš Zmeškal’s Love Let­ter in Cuneiform for an evening with the novel’s trans­la­tor Alex Zuck­er in Prague. I’d rec­om­mend an excerpt from Zmeškal’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Socrates at the Equa­tor about his search for his Con­golese father and the lack of bib­li­cal sto­ries of father’s aban­don­ing sons. I’m try­ing to write three books at once now, which is dri­ving me a lit­tle crazy. If I seem crazy in this inter­view, it’s prob­a­bly at least part­ly because of this. One book is a nov­el about the pol­i­tics of his­tor­i­cal inter­pre­ta­tion. It start­ed out as a kind of par­o­dy, but sad­ly the con­text of the cur­rent assault on his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge and prac­tice has trans­formed it into more of a tragedy, or maybe a eulo­gy for a van­ish­ing age. In part­ner­ship with Ross Ben­jamin, I have been work­ing on a Kaf­ka-themed sub­stack called FRANZ. I have a new sto­ry there called ​“The Fist,” which is a retelling of Kafka’s retelling of the Tow­er of Babel story. 

SL: In the spir­it of cre­ative read­ing, I’d love to rec­om­mend Avn­er Lan­des’ aston­ish­ing new nov­el, The Del­e­ga­tion. While on the sur­face it tells the sto­ry of two Sovi­et Jew­ish artists sent to the Unit­ed States dur­ing World War II by Stal­in to ral­ly sup­port for his par­ty, it bril­liant­ly upends nar­ra­tive con­ven­tion by weav­ing three dif­fer­ent, dynam­ic sto­ry lines as well as fact and fic­tion and metafic­tion in a mind-blow­ing, hilar­i­ous, and dev­as­tat­ing choose-your-own adven­ture that embod­ies rad­i­cal lit­er­a­ture at its core. As for writ­ing, I am cur­rent­ly in the pro­duc­tion stages for a chap­book of three Jew­ish sto­ries, and a new nov­el, Hid­den Riv­er, due out in May 2026. Beyond that, I’ll share that this anthol­o­gy con­tin­ues to nour­ish in sur­pris­ing ways, as I just may be in the ear­ly stages of a new nov­el extreme­ly loose­ly inspired by the clas­sic tri­an­gle of envy: Rachel, Leah, and Jacob set in the world of 1990s mag­a­zine cul­ture, as that sto­ry is anoth­er one that has­n’t yet been smashed to bits in our pages.