Neal Pollack
By Neal Pollack
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Culture Why We Need a New Saul Bellow…and Many Other New Things
‘Surely one of the healthier ironies of the United States is that its finest postwar novelist was an illegal immigrant from Canada. I realize that in pointing this out I risk stoking the moronic inferno of this season’s national seekers of high office, but also, more seriously, of mischaracterizing Saul Bellow’s genius.” —Why We Need…
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Culture Me and Patti Smith and Andy Warhol and 1970’s New York and Me
I remember New York in the 1970s. We were just kids. The city was on fire and we listened to vinyl. We lived in the Chelsea Hotel, all of us: me, Robert Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Ultra Violet, Shel Silverstein, Margot Kidder, Richard Pryor, Bianca Jagger, Roger Angell, Joey Ramone, Debbie Harry, George Plimpton…
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Culture Still Life With Chicken: A Writer’s Journey
August 1985 Dusk falls in Iowa. I sit around the back-porch table with Tobias Wolff, Geoffrey Wolff, Lazar Wolf, Wolf Blitzer, Richard Brautigan, Leonard Michaels, and Gordon Lish, all my mentors. The pages of my first workshop short story sit in front of them. They all stare at me, mouth agape, near-tears, except for Lish,…
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Film & TV When Amy Schumer Met Virginia Woolf
Last week, the news came over the transom, hitting writers’ heads like a 3,000-pound sack of envy: Comedian Amy Schumer will be receiving $9 million for a volume of her memoirs. Even more disturbing was the fact that she’d already returned $1 million, an amount that 10 writers combined won’t earn in two lifetimes, to…
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Culture How the Pontiff Welcomes in Yontef
Shalom, good yontef, good yontef, good yontef, namaste, y’all. I am the pope, the literal representative of the Lord on Earth. Please be seated. Put away your selfie sticks. This is serious business. Before I begin my sermon, I just have to ask: How do you rabbis do it? If I had to offer biblical…
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Culture Why My Son Won’t Be Having a Bar Mitzvah
My son, who’s turning 13 on Halloween, won’t be having a bar mitzvah. This is what’s happening, or not happening. The entry in the Book of Life has been written, the invitations not sent out, the food truck and DJ not ordered. I feel shame and guilt and other emotions that I can’t identify, for…
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Culture The End of the Beginning of Neal Pollack’s Tour
Adapted From “The Beginning Of The End Of The Tour: Days On The Road With Neal Pollack, A Writer Of Whom I Wish I’d Never Heard,” by Aaron Lipschultz Screenplay by Joshua Lipstein Aaron Lipschultz, a successful journalist in his late 20s, enters a middle-American diner. There sits Neal Pollack, a mostly-failed novelist in his…
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Culture The Only Summer Book Guide You Need To Read
There can be no doubt that people who read are very passionate about reading. But reading is in trouble, because no one reads anymore. Why pick up a book when you could watch celebrities walking their dogs on Periscope or stream all 17 seasons of “House M.D.” using a Kindle Fire stick that’s plugged into…
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