Salman Rushdie is on the phone, and there is much I’d like to ask. For starters: Did Bob Dylan deserve the Nobel? On second thought, maybe better to go with the old Forward standard: What’s your favorite bagel? After all, Rushdie is aware that the truth of a character often lies in the details. That…
“I am not interested in writing about what people should do for the good of the human race and pretending that’s what they do do, but writing about what they indeed do,” Philip Roth once told The Paris Review. Roth died this year, and as readers grapple with his legacy in 2018, leading feminist thinker…
In his 2004 novel “The Plot Against America,” the late Philip Roth depicted an America that loses its soul: A wealthy celebrity wins a presidential election by scapegoating an entire community and goes on to turn the U.S. government into an instrument of bigotry and authoritarianism. While Roth’s first-person account weaved together an alternate past…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. In the course of their ongoing debate, the literary critic Irving Howe used to complain that Philip Roth’s writing suffered from a weak connection to the Jewish tradition and that he was a writer with a “thin personal culture.” What strikes us more than 40 years later,…
Michael Pollan had enlightenment envy. Unlike most patients in clinical trials of psilocybin, when Pollan ate a magic mushroom, he wasn’t terrified by a terminal illness, he wasn’t suffering from alcoholism or depression and he hadn’t been diagnosed with a personality disorder. But he “envied the radical new perspectives” of the people in psychedelic therapy…
I last spoke with Philip about a week before his death. A few days earlier, I had emailed him the tape that I discovered of the 1962 Yeshiva University symposium that he’d remember always as a crucial turning point — one, in equal measure, dreadful and indispensable. It was just the sort of experience that,…
NEW YORK (JTA) — Philip Roth forbade any Jewish rituals from being performed at his funeral. The prolific Jewish-American author, who died on Tuesday at the age of 85, will be buried on Monday at the Bard College Cemetery, his biographer, Blake Bailey, told JTA. Roth had originally looked into being buried next to his…
Dear readers, it’s Memorial Day weekend, and as we remember those who have given their lives for our country, we have also earned a bit of rest. If your version of rest includes getting out and about to do cultural things, by all means do so. Read on for our weekend culture recommendations in New…
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