A great American novelist dies
Philip Roth: A Life Recalled
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Culture Philip Roth Is Immersing Himself In Jewish History, And Doesn’t Know How To Respond To #MeToo
Philip Roth, almost 85 years old and seven years into retirement, is just another Upper West Sider who might be mistaken for Bernie Sanders. Except, that is, for the persistently thwarted Nobel hopes, the all-too-timely novels about American demagoguery and the graphic and controversial portrayals of male sexuality. In a new interview with Charles McGrath…
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Culture Honoring Philip Roth In Newark, Robert Caro Spoke Of Civil Rights, Power And Morality
In the future, when some scholarly young Jew flirts with bankruptcy while composing an engagingly voluminous biography of noted biographer-of-length Robert Caro, he or she might note the occasion, last week, upon which Caro took to a Newark Public Library Stage to deliver that institution’s Second Annual Philip Roth Lecture. Worth particular observation would be…
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Culture Philip Roth Doesn’t Believe He’s An American Jew
Is Philip Roth an American Jew? The answer seems obvious, except to the novelist himself. In an essay for The New Yorker titled “I Have Fallen in Love With American Names” and adapted from Roth’s 2002 speech accepting the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, Roth takes a dreamlike look back…
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News Nobel Prize Committee: Dylan Given Prize ‘Mostly To Mess With Roth’
In an exclusive on-the-record interview with The Backward, three members of the Nobel Prize Committee broke off from listening to Abba to explain their reasons for awarding the Literature Prize to a 1960s folk singer who sounds like a punctured accordion. “Oh, yah. We gave it to him mostly to keep screwing with Philip Roth’s…
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Fast Forward Philip Roth, Stephen Sondheim Join Writers Exhorting Trump To Reconsider Immigration Ban
Philip Roth, Stephen Sondheim, Art Spiegelman and a number of other Jewish luminaries have lent their names to an open letter beseeching President Trump to reconsider restricting entry to the country for refugees from around the world and immigrants from a group of Muslim-majority countries. The letter, signed by 65 writers and artists and written…
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Culture Before Trump, Philip Roth Took Aim At The ‘Grotesquerie’ Of Ronald Reagan, Too
Back in January, Philip Roth gave an email interview in the New Yorker in which he was asked to respond to the election of Donald Trump. In a string of fittingly eloquent invective, Roth called Trump “humanly impoverished,” and “incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency.” “It isn’t Trump as…
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Fast Forward Philip Roth Calls Trump an Ignorant Con Man With ‘Vocabulary of 77 Words’
Novelist Philip Roth has lashed out at President Trump as an ignorant “con man” who could do untold damage to the country. The retired “Portnoy’s Complaint” author told the New Yorker that Trump makes other polarizing Republicans like Richard Nixon and George W. Bush look angelic by comparison. “Trump is ignorant of government, of history,…
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Fast Forward For President Obama, Jewish Authors Gave Voice to Outsider Experience in America
In one of his last interviews in office, President Barack Obama told The New York Times’ chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, that he thinks Philip Roth and Saul Bellow rank among the greatest authors to explore the experience of being an outsider in the United States. “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like…
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