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About Daniel

Bright elderly man with white beard and glasses at Rattling Good Yarns Press.

Daniel M. Jaffe is an award-winning writer whose short stories and personal essays have appeared in over half a dozen countries and several languages. The recipient of a Norman Mailer Writers Colony Residency in Provincetown, MA, Daniel has been profiled in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature. His work has been taught in college and university courses, and he holds degrees from Princeton University (A.B.), Harvard Law School (J.D.), and Vermont College of Fine Arts (M.F.A.). He lives in California with his husband, the writer and professor, Leo Cabranes-Grant.

 

Sample Reviews of Daniel’s Books of Fiction:

  • Yeled Tov (a novel): “Talk about a terrific coming of age story! I just loved Jaffe’s writing…. The writing, characters, and story are top notch – engaging, unforgettable and completely unputdownable…truly such a great story.” http://abookishwayoflife.blogspot.com/
  • The Genealogy of Understanding (a novel-in-stories): “Jaffe is a marvelous storyteller…. The characters are sensitively drawn and come to life in his hands.” Congregational Libraries Today.
  • Jewish Gentle and Other Stories of Gay-Jewish Living (a short-story collection): “Jaffe’s gift with language, with voice, with temporality, with suspense, with humor, with character, with mood made each of his tales utterly engaging. Never has the familiar felt as fresh as it does in Jaffe’s stories….Jaffe has a particular gift for capturing the complicated emotional currents swirling around coming out…. By telling such well-spun tales with such well-crafted characters, Jaffe has left me wanting more…but in the best way.” Out in Print.
  • The Limits of Pleasure (a novel): “Bawdy eroticism is juxtaposed with sentimentality, depravity interlaced with piety, and the sacred wedded to the profane in this acrid comedy….masterfully written…an entertaining and salient piece. Jaffe is unquestionably a gifted writer with much to say in a voice that is rarely heard.” XFactor.

Bright elderly man with white beard and glasses at Rattling Good Yarns Press.

Daniel M. Jaffe is an award-winning writer whose short stories and personal essays have appeared in over half a dozen countries and several languages. The recipient of a Norman Mailer Writers Colony Residency in Provincetown, MA, Daniel has been profiled in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature. His work has been taught in college and university courses, and he holds degrees from Princeton University (A.B.), Harvard Law School (J.D.), and Vermont College of Fine Arts (M.F.A.). He lives in California with his husband, the writer and professor, Leo Cabranes-Grant.

Sample Reviews of Daniel’s Books of Fiction:

  • Yeled Tov (a novel): “Talk about a terrific coming of age story! I just loved Jaffe’s writing…. The writing, characters, and story are top notch – engaging, unforgettable and completely unputdownable…truly such a great story.” http://abookishwayoflife.blogspot.com/
  • The Genealogy of Understanding (a novel-in-stories): “Jaffe is a marvelous storyteller…. The characters are sensitively drawn and come to life in his hands.” Congregational Libraries Today.
  • Jewish Gentle and Other Stories of Gay-Jewish Living (a short-story collection): “Jaffe’s gift with language, with voice, with temporality, with suspense, with humor, with character, with mood made each of his tales utterly engaging. Never has the familiar felt as fresh as it does in Jaffe’s stories….Jaffe has a particular gift for capturing the complicated emotional currents swirling around coming out…. By telling such well-spun tales with such well-crafted characters, Jaffe has left me wanting more…but in the best way.” Out in Print.
  • The Limits of Pleasure (a novel): “Bawdy eroticism is juxtaposed with sentimentality, depravity interlaced with piety, and the sacred wedded to the profane in this acrid comedy….masterfully written…an entertaining and salient piece. Jaffe is unquestionably a gifted writer with much to say in a voice that is rarely heard.” XFactor.

Books by Daniel M. Jaffe Available from Rattling Good Yarns Press

Book cover for "Russian Silhouette: A Memoir of Activism and Identity" by Daniel M. Jaffe. The top half features the title in bold black and pink serif typography on a white textured background. The bottom half shows a close-up of a hand-painted wooden Russian Matryoshka doll (nesting doll) with a bright pink headscarf, dark hair, and a somber, pensive facial expression.

Russian Silhouette: A Memoir of Activism and Identity

Russian Silhouette is the memoir of Daniel M. Jaffe, a Jewish Princeton student who spends two summers in the oppressive, antisemitic USSR of the late 1970s. While there, he befriends Soviet Jews, refuseniks (Soviet Jews denied government permission to emigrate), and political dissidents who are living under constant government threat. The KGB surveils and arrests Daniel, warning him never to return. He returns anyway. Over multiple subsequent trips behind the Iron Curtain, Daniel quietly brings in money, medicine, and vital information from Western human rights organizations to support his friends and others, who are, one by one, being arrested, imprisoned, then sentenced to labor camp or internal exile. Back in the US, Daniel leads a Jewish human rights committee at Harvard Law School, translating and circulating smuggled dissident trial transcripts to help promote international protest campaigns in efforts to free political prisoners. But Russian Silhouette is more than a Cold War thriller; it is a memoir of personal liberation. Inspired by his friends’ courage in the face of authoritarianism, Daniel gains the strength to come out as gay and fight for civil rights at home. Russian Silhouette demonstrates the power of political activism and tikkun olam — the imperative to repair the world — to help others and heal oneself.

$24.95

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The front cover of "The Grand Sex Tour Murders," featuring a dramatic black and white photograph of a European sculpture of men.

The Grand Sex Tour Murders

What happens when you combine a tongue-in-cheek spoof of murder mysteries, reality TV romance competitions, and the live-streaming gay porn industry? You get The Grand Sex Tour Murders!

$18.95

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Front cover of "Foreign Affairs"

Foreign Affairs: Male Tales of Lust & Love

In this newest story collection from award-winning writer, Daniel M. Jaffe, red-blooded American men make mischief while vacationing abroad. They encounter a serial killer in a Munich bathhouse, a gay Holocaust ghost in Prague, a shape-shifting seductress in Mexico City, a desperate prostitute in Seville, a closeted Catholic school administrator in Dublin, and many others. These stories will transport, titillate, intrigue, and tug at your heartstrings.

$17.95

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Other Books by Daniel M. Jaffe

  • Yeled Tov, a novel (2018)
  • The Genealogy of Understanding, a novel-in-stories (2014)
  • Jewish Gentle and Other Stories of Gay-Jewish Living, a short-story collection (2011)
  • One-Foot Lover, a fiction chapbook (2009)
  • The Limits of Pleasure, a novel (2001; reprinted 2010 and 2019)
  • With Signs and Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulist Fiction, a
    short-story anthology that Daniel compiled and edited (2001)
  • Here Comes the Messiah! by Dina Rubina, a Russian-Israeli novel that Daniel translated
    from the Russian (2000)