As word came over the transom last week (an actual transom, since I don’t have a working computer) that Philip Roth was retiring, I dismissed it as old, dull news. I’d read the report in the original French, and translated it myself into Turkish and then into Swiss-German just for fun. Then, along with the…
There’s no consensus about when writers should put down their pens. Some, like J.D. Salinger or E.M. Forster, stop very early. Others, like Philip Roth until his recent announcement, keep publishing brilliant work well into their later years. There’s no conventional wisdom here, no right answer. Yet when such a decision is reached, IT’s time…
We’ve reached a strange point in the ongoing saga, “Philip Roth: America’s Greatest Living Writer.” After releasing a new book every year from 2006 through 2010, he stopped without anyone noticing. In an interview with a French newspaper, partly translated by Salon on Friday, Roth announced that he was done writing novels. “Nemesis” would be…
Seminal author Philip Roth, whose novels explored modern Jewish-American life, has told a French magazine that he will write no more books because he has lost his passion for it. The author of such novels as “American Pastoral”, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and “Portnoy’s Complaint” slipped his retirement announcement into an interview…
Salon is reporting, on the basis of an interview with a French magazine, that Philip Roth is putting down his pen as a novelist. “To tell you the truth, I’m done,” Roth told the magazine, in the most definitive statement he has ever made about his future plans. “‘Nemesis’ will be my last book.” Roth…
Promiscuous: ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness By Bernard Avishai Yale University Press, 240 pages, $25 ‘Promiscuous: ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness” is a very serious and very funny book about a very serious and very funny book. Philip Roth’s “Portnoy’s Complaint,” published in 1969, was not only an instant…
Whether for catching balls, protecting hands or knocking your opponent’s block off, gloves have played many roles in American sports and culture — and Jews have been a big part of practically all of them. Jewish ingenuity outfitted Hall of Famer Hank (The Hebrew Hammer) Greenberg with a revolutionary baseball mitt, made the boxing glove…
The modern history of Finland’s Jews, who during World War II fought on the Nazi side to combat the Russians, is genuinely surreal. It seems appropriate that the leading novelist of Finland’s tiny Jewish population — today estimated at around 1,500 people — should be equally expressive of a surrealist sensibility. Daniel Katz, born in…
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