A great American novelist dies
Philip Roth: A Life Recalled
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News Bucky Cantor and the Idea of the Good
What is the right thing to do — what is the good? And does doing it, if indeed we can know it, bring happiness? These questions are not exactly new. They are also not exactly bad. “Nemesis” raises them rather more starkly, and elegantly, than other books Philip Roth has written. “Nemesis” also adds little…
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News Arnie Mesnikoff, Unbound
In “Nemesis,” Philip Roth has written a deeply Proustian narrative of remembrance and loss in which the invisible power of the past takes its vengeance upon a 5’4”, short-sighted, earnest and physically powerful young man of limited imagination but innocent and good intentions. Understanding the position of the Jew in the modern world, as Max…
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Culture Four Questions About ‘Nemesis’ Answered
I’ve organized my talk around four questions: 1) How does “Nemesis” fit into the body of Philip Roth’s work? Roth has gone a long way toward answering this question. On the page preceding the title page of “Nemesis,” he lays out a neat Linnaean classification of his many novels. At the top are listed the…
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News Scars Without End
In “Nemesis,” much like elsewhere in that astonishing canvas that is Philip Roth’s work, community is something that no credible human being can live with and whose absence tears, scars without end. It seems not insignificant that the greatest of all living novelists to explore the inescapability of aloneness is born of a people that…
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Books Roth the Invincible
A prolific novelist, Philip Roth, at 78, has authored 31 novels and received the most distinguished literary awards, including, most recently, the Man Booker International Prize, which was awarded to him yesterday despite heavy opposition from one of the judges, Carmen Calil. Calil, a feminist author and publisher, criticized Roth’s repetitiveness and resigned from the…
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The Schmooze Out and About: Stanley Kubrik’s Unmade Holocaust Movie; A 19th-Century Female Cantor Remembered
Richard Brody discovers Stanley Kubrik’s unmade Holocaust film, “The Aryan Papers.” Joel Schalit has a run-in with the garbage Nazis of Stuttgart. Philip Roth is among the nominees for the Man Booker International Prize. Forward contributor Mark Oppenheimer on the new teenage anti-hero. Rediscovering Julie Eichberg Rosewald, cantor at San Francisco’s Temple Emanu-El from 1884…
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The Schmooze Out and About: Spielberg Gets Wikileaks Movie; The Origins of Jewish Humor
Michael Weiss on why Boris Pasternak matters. Was Jewish humor created in 1661? Steven Spielberg has secured the rights to make a Wikileaks movie. The new edition of the Laba Journal, “Eros,” is out, featuring Stephen Hazan Arnoff on music and artificial memory, Shari Mendelson on the work of Charles LeDray, fiction by Jeremiah Lockwood,…
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Books Forward Fives: 2010 in Fiction
In this, the second annual Forward Fives selection, we celebrate the year’s cultural output with a series of deliberately eclectic choices in film, music, theater, exhibitions and books. Here we present five of the most important Jewish novels of 2010. Feel free to argue with and add to our selections in the comments. It’s been…
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