This month Anne reads “The Conversion of the Jews,” by Philip Roth In 1959, Philip Roth published a novella and five stories. The collection was called “Goodbye, Columbus,” and it won that year’s National Book Award. Everybody was talking about the new young writer who had a brash, unconventional, authentic voice and a thumb-in-your-eye spirit….
Some book lovers see the annual circus around the Nobel Prize in literature as mostly Swedish political meshugas, often not primarily about quality of writing. Others retain optimism about the award’s potential for spreading news about worthy honorees such as Imre Kertész (2002); Joseph Brodsky (1987); Elias Canetti (1981), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978). The…
The title “Indignation” doesn’t suggest a movie about nostalgia. But “Indignation,” directed by James Schamus and based the 2008 novel by Philip Roth, is about nostalgia in its purest form — about the way time slips through our fingers, about the bittersweet solace of memory, and about how every choice has unforeseen and irreversible consequences….
A candidate galvanizes a weakened and divided Republican Party. He’s a celebrity, a charismatic outsider with no political experience, and his racist rhetoric does nothing to halt his momentum. As Philip Roth wrote, “Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear.” Am I the only one who — just a week ago — pulled Roth’s…
No one does dystopia quite like the Jews. We claim no monopoly but, after Hitler (and to paraphrase Walter Pater), all dystopias all aspire to the condition of Jewish tragedy. And it seems that the official anthem for dystopias is 1982’s “Mad World,” by Tears for Fears. It’s not always used for obvious sadness. Here…
“The indigenous American berserk,” Philip Roth called it. He was writing about the violent, calamitous antiwar counterculture of the late 1960s, when the center would not hold, when prosperous, placid Swede Levov, the Newark businessman at the center of Roth’s “American Pastoral,” saw his idyllic life upended by a beloved daughter who went the way…
Sundance Film Festival, the film industry’s annual takeover of Park City, Utah, kicked off last Thursday, and already three films of particular note have been picked up for distribution. Weiner In May, Sundance Selects will release “Weiner,” filmed primarily during Anthony Weiner’s second bid to become mayor of New York City. The film was supposed…
In May, 2015, we profiled Paul Beatty, author of “The Sellout.” Now that Beatty has become the first American to win the Man Booker Prize, we’re revisiting that article. As it turns out, Beatty isn’t that much like Roth after all — Roth never won the Booker (he did, however, win the Man International Booker in 2011)….
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