Books
Tales of the Chelm First Ward
When God created the world, he sent an angel to spread the souls of fools evenly across the earth. Unfortunately, the angel tripped. As a result, the town of Chelm became home to the world's most densely concentrated nonsense. Though most stories about Chelm are Jewish, Tales of the Chelm First Ward follows a group of locals who recently became Latter-day Saints.
The thirty-two stories in this collection offer glimpses into the Chelm ward's uniquely Mormon illogic. Fruma Selig hears it's important for her daughters to marry in the church and worries when one insists instead on getting married in the temple. Heshel is so hungry one fast Sunday that it's hard to calculate what he owes the Lord. Shmuel Peretz knows that eight is the age of accountability and doesn't want to waste any last free chances to sin before his birthday. Through a large cast of equally misguided but mostly likeable characters, captured in accompanying art by David Habben, Tales of the Chelm First Ward pays tribute to the everyday absurdities that come with a community of faith.
THE Burning Book
$11.95 paperback, $9.99 ebook, also available on audible
Jason Olson felt God’s presence in the Jewish tradition he was raised in. So what was he supposed to do when he also heard God’s voice in the Book of Mormon?
The Burning Book traces Jason’s spiritual journey from aspiring rabbi to Latter-day Saint missionary, from Brigham Young University student to Israeli immigrant, and from Jewish Studies scholar to military chaplain. It’s a memoir about one man’s experience finding God: in two faiths, in two countries, and in the lives of other people.
Co-written with novelist and poet James Goldberg (author of The Five Books of Jesus and A Book of Lamentations). The Burning Book offers readers a glimpse into Jewish and Mormon cultures and asks what it means to seek the voice of prophets in a modern, multicultural world.
THE BOLLYWOOD LOVERS’ CLUB
$16.99 paperback (bookshop), $22.99 hardcover, $4.99 ebook
Amrita Sidhu belongs: in her Indian extended family, in her Sikh faith, in her California home. But when a family fight makes up her father’s mind to take a job in Ohio, she’s torn from the fabric of her community and left to find her footing in a new high school and a new life.
In Ohio, Amrita meets Dave Gill, who’s funny, part-Indian, and Mormon. At a series of Bollywood movie nights with friends, they begin to connect—despite the pressure they both feel not to date outside their own faith.
As Amrita stares down diverging paths for her future, she knows only one thing for certain: she can’t hold on to everything.
Song of Names: A Mormon Mosaic
$15.99 paperback, $7.99 kindle
In 2015, Beirut’s district president takes the dangerous road to Damascus once a month to bring the sacrament to Syrian Saints. In 1904, a ward rallies around a mentally ill member in Salt Lake City after he’s institutionalized. In 1844, a sister gathers new members on the South Pacific atoll of Anaa and teaches them the gospel by singing hymns from dusk until midnight. The twenty-two poems in Song of Names draw images from the lives of ordinary Latter-day Saints from many times and places to make a mosaic of discipleship. Accompanied by historical introductions, reflective essays, and original fine art sketches, this collaboration between James Goldberg, Ardis E. Parshall, and Carla Jimison is a monument to two centuries of struggle and faith.
A Book of Lamentations
$15.99 paperback, $5.99 kindle
In his fourth volume of poetry, James Goldberg writes in a register of religious lament as he wrestles with a changing climate, a pandemic, and fissures in the fabric of society. The collection’s fifty-three poems, accompanied by original artworks by Camilla Stark, map anxieties the world faced in the years leading up to and including 2020 and raise a warning voice about the destructive choices we collectively continue to make.
The five books of jesus
$14.95 paperback, $6.99 kindle, also available on audible
It starts in the desert. John the prophet lowers Jesus under the Jordan’s muddy waters and pulls him up, just as a bird swoops down to skim the river’s surface. It spreads next to Galilee, where some welcome Jesus as a disciple of John and others grow wary of his rising influence—fishermen are leaving their nets, tax collectors their offices, and students their masters to listen to this new saint. After abandoning his nets, Andrew ties knots in the threads of his shirt to remember Jesus’ teachings. After escaping his slum, Judas waits for Jesus to call down the legions of angels who can end a broken world. But just as Jesus’ movement in the north is gaining strength, he turns south toward the Temple and a fate his followers will struggle to understand. The Five Books of Jesus, James Goldberg’s lyrical novelization of Jesus’ ministry, tells the story of the gospels as Jesus' followers might have experienced it: without knowing what would happen next or how to make sense of events as they unfold.
Let me drown with moses
$12.95 paperback (bookshop), $4.99 kindle
The forty-nine poems in Let Me Drown With Moses are not for those who think of religion as another name for self-help.
They are for those who still believe in a God who wrestles. For those who think faith should challenge as much as it comforts. For those who would follow a prophet chest-deep into the Red Sea, even before the waters part.
Drawing on imagery from scripture and Mormon history, Let Me Drown With Moses gives voice to the spiritual longing of a people and does its own small part to keep religion a living language in the 21st century.
Phoenix Song
$12.95 paperback (bookshop), $3.99 kindle
In this follow-up to his 2015 collection, Let Me Drown With Moses, James Goldberg explores themes of suffering, community, faith, and discipleship with both an unflinching commitment to God and a clear-eyed perspective on the difficulties of mortality. Whether telling stories from Goldberg's ward, chronicling his experience in chemotherapy, imagining alternate histories, or commenting on the scriptures and society, the poems in Phoenix Song describe what it means both to feel burned to the ground and to rise from the ashes.
The first five-dozen tales of razia shah
$12.95 paperback (bookshop), $3.99 kindle
Razia Shah—a promising, bright, suicidally-depressed seventeen-year-old living in New Delhi—has to tell herself a new story each day to convince herself to keep living until the next. Amir Mousa, a Palestinian shopkeeper in North Carolina, finds his thoughts jolting back to his lost village after he wins the lottery. Soon Punjabi, Congolese, and Mexican immigrants’ stories are told following the structure of the Jewish liturgical calendar, the folk hero of a forgotten people embarks on a quest to gather stories like grain against a famine, the leader of a merchant household in an alternate Indian Ocean trading culture is forced to confront his failure to keep a covenant with his slaves, and a hospital patient begins hallucinating the life history of his Indian-American anesthesiologist’s father. The novella and five short stories that make up The First Five-Dozen Tales of Razia Shah and Other Stories combine fantastical imagery and lyrical language to meditate on the pressures human beings face in an era of migration and rapid social change—and the power of storytelling in the face of those pressures.
Remember the revolution
$12.95 paperback (bookshop), $4.99 kindle
In 2006, 22-year-old James Goldberg moved to Utah, dreaming of possibilities for Mormon artistic community. Though the ride was often rough, he spent the next five years feeling his way forward, finding a voice to speak the language of the tradition in his own distinct register. The twelve essays and short stories in Remember the Revolution chronicle those experiments, giving voice to the idealism, anxiety, and insight of a young Mormon writer.
Whether imagining the experience of a Mormon Bollywood playback singer, giving the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin a seat in Primary, telling the story of the early Restoration through an imagined sequence of Joseph Smith’s anxious dreams, or writing an inverted theology in the form of spam emails, Goldberg grapples with ways Mormon thought can engage with the cultures around it and speak to the pressing questions simmering beneath the surface of the modern world. At turns sincere, satirical, surreal, and somber, Remember the Revolution is vital reading for anyone interested in the potential of a distinctly Mormon literature.