Mark Jay Mirsky

Mark Jay Mirsky is an American writer and professor of English at City College of New York.

His first three novels (Thou Worm Jacob, Proceedings of the Rabble, and Blue Hill Avenue) present a humorous and scathing portrait of the Jewish community of and around Blue Hill Avenue in Dorchester.

Mirsky's later, more experimental, works include The Red Adam, a novel written in the form of a "discovered" document unearthed in a Massachusetts library sometime in the 1940s. He also published a pair of novellas under the name The Secret Table. The first story, "Dorchester, Home and Garden," deals with a man who returns to the burnt-out Jewish district on Blue Hill Avenue, and the second, "Onan's Child", is a retelling of the biblical story of Onan.

Mirsky wrote several books of nonfiction including My Search for the Messiah: Studies and Wanderings in Israel and America and The Absent Shakespeare. His latest book, Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah, is a combination of literary criticism, Jewish mysticism and personal narrative.

Mirsky has also edited, and wrote the introduction for, Diaries: Robert Musil 1899-1942, and published several works and articles in The Partisan Review, New Directions Annual, The Boston Sunday Globe, and The New York Times Review of Books. He is currently the editor of Fiction,a literary magazine at City College which he founded in 1972 with Donald Barthelme and Max Frisch.

Recently, one of Mirsky's plays, Mother Hubbard's Cupboard, was performed as part of the 2007 New York International Fringe Festival.

External links

• Mirsky about 9/11
• Interview about Dante, Eros and Kabbalah
• Review of Mother Hubbard's Cupboard