Welcome to Detour Books Annual Swift SALE
Enjoy Exploring Our Tiny Marketplace
Curated Gift Sets for the inspired Birthday, Sweet Heart, or Starter Library. Take a look here.
Enter the Swift Shop theme for January.
Spend $35 or more and choose a FREE used book on Black History, Art, Political Science and more - supplies limited.
Glad you’re back and if this is your first visit enjoy exploring our collections.
So what's the story here?
Detour Books: Found in Translation is a curated shop for multicultural literature - with a focus on Yiddish writers. We're also your source for exquisite gifts with a mid-century modern design bent. We have one-of-a-kind textiles as well as Yup Coffee from one of the finest roasters in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.
The pace of this particular marketplace is brisk. You may want to sign up for the quarterly-ish e-newsletter so you don't miss our book events, limited edition gifts, daring flash sales and Curated Gift Sets at prices as sweet as chocolate.
We have a selection of items that are part of our year-round core collection - but keep an eye on the Swift Shop, a 30-day themed collection. Why so quick? Limitations push ingenuity. And we know if you've landed at Detour it's because you followed that gentle madness for books we share.
And don't forget the coffee.
Yiddish in Translation
150 Voices: Lorin Sklamberg & Polina Shepherd, Music CD
Works in English Translation
Exclusive chat with Miriam Udel on the process of editing and translation:
"Selecting the entries was nearly as large a task as translating them, and in some respects more daunting. Which texts would gain new life in English now, and which would be left to flicker on in their digitized, but readerless lives - at least for the moment? With my choices I have implicitly proposed a canon, although by no means an authoritative one.
I hope that readers will not only delight in the stories and poems I have included, but also question what I left out and perhaps some readers will even be moved to go find out for themselves. I made my choices as a scholar, a mother and a rabbi, selecting works that I thought might speak to my own children and that would enrich my Jewish community as well as our understanding of Ashkenazi Jewish modernity.
It seems to be working. The other night my son confided a back-to-school jitters dream. I reached for the book and read him Moyshe Shirfris’s The Alphabet Gets Angry, a story about a boy’s jitters on the eve of the first day of school. 'Is it too babyish or do you like it?' I asked. 'It’s a little young for me,' he said (he’s in middle school and its more an elementary-level story), 'but it’s really fun and I like it a lot.'”
You've heard of tiny houses? Well, you've landed in a tiny marketplace.
Expect to be surprised!
Go ahead, judge a book by its cover.
Indeed, the origins and life trajectories of the book’s protagonists were substantially different. King, in the thirty-nine years before his life was brutally cut short, was at the center of the civil rights movement.
Frank was a teenager at the time of her death in Bergen-Belsen. Through her diary, she later became a symbol of different concepts: the need to combat antisemitism, Jewish national self-determination, the horrors of genocide, and the power of young women’s voices.
Emily Schneider for the Jewish Book Council