My Books
The bitch comes back, mid-October 2024. 15th anniversary edition, first time as a paperback. Click on the cover to pre-order.
"Into a sea of earnestness, battle metaphors, and euphemisms came Wisenberg's straight talking, artfully constructed memoir, contributing to a changing landscape of how we talk about bodies. Many of us who have traveled the breast cancer path after Wisenberg, pens in hand, owe her a debt."--Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Memoir of Family, Feminism, and Treason
"virtuosic...poignant"--Kyle Minor, Salon
"Sandi Wisenberg's account of her diagnosis, treatment, and lives, before and after, forces her and us into our collective history. Having written well about the Holocaust, as she has admirably done, suddenly places her account of her illness into a new re-reading of the past, the present, and the future. Brilliantly written; extraordinarily moving.--Sander L. Gilman,
author of Difference and Pathology
"deeply personal, often darkly funny"–Kirkus Reviews
"(An) incredible book.... Wisenberg is acerbic, unsettling, truthful, and often hilarious." --Rain Taxi
"A frank, funny and insightful account of one woman's battle with breast cancer. Wisenberg reveals the realities of life with cancer and how smarts, style and a self-deprecating sense of humor help her fight back against disease."--Self magazine Cancer Resource
"...defiant, combative, [she[ uses humor strategically..[and] uses cancer as a subversive muse." --Mary K. DeShazer, Mammographies: The Cultural Discoures of Breast Cancer
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Winner, Juniper Prize in creative nonfiction; finalist, Chicago Review of Books CHIRBy award in nonfiction
✶Shortlist, Chicago Review of Books (CHIRBy) Award in nonfiction
"…a fact-filled exploration of the Jewish body, the Jewish woman and her place or absence in tradition, and what a Jewish inheritance means on a soul-level in America today." – Emily Sulzman, Jewish Book Council
" Wisenberg continues her frank and provocative inquiries into perceptions of the female body." --Donna Seaman, Booklist
"intellectual, deeply personal, and delightful"--Rachel Lutwik-Deaner, The Southern Review of Books
"A sharp, deeply questioning mind and a wayward heart inform these delicious essays. They are wry, humorous, melancholy, and universally relatable, filled with the shock of recognition."----Phillip Lopate, editor of The Art of the Personal Essay, author of A Year and a Day and many other books
Interview with Scott Simon
"equal parts Fran Lebowitz and Leon Wieseltier"--Kirkus Reviews
"This is one of the more provocative collections of writing I have encountered in some time, and I remain in admiration of Wisenberg for her curiosity, her use of imagination, and her eloquence...Wisenberg is an original voice, a writer who takes risks, and...I'd willingly follow her anywhere her mind may take her/us."--Maureen Stanton, Fourth Genre
"Anyone who gets meditative around the High Holy Days, wondering exactly what it means to be a contemporary American and a Jew, will find a caring companion in Chicago-based journalist S.L. Wisenberg. . . .The strength of this collection is not so much in the answers Wisenberg provides, but in the questions she raises." --Amy Waldman, Forward
"With her lucid style and power of observation, Wisenberg's insightful essays are gems not to be missed." --Booklist
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"Traditional Jewish storytelling is given a vibrant new twist in The Sweetheart Is In, a witty and intimate debut collection of short stories by S.L. Wisenberg." --Publishers Weekly
"Wisenberg's witty, aphoristic style sometimes recalls the voice of Grace Paley's wise protagonist, Faith." --Valerie Miner, Chicago Tribune
"Wisenberg presents a tart first collection of short stories concerned with the threads that hold families together....With humor and wisdom, Wisenberg charts the small misfortunes and heartbreaks that a lifetime contains and gives readers sharply drawn characters they will enjoy meeting." --Brendan Dowling, Booklist
"She is an important Jewish storyteller, but with a fresh voice."--Sally Dooley, Review of Texas Books
"Perhaps S.L. Wisenberg is one of Jewish literature's lamed vovniks--keeping Jewish literature fresh and vital and insuring that the Jewish writer is still a unique storyteller and observer of Jewish life like no other writer."--Judith Bolton-Fassman, JBooks
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