Philip Roth

Leon Neyfakh tracks the latest bookish fad: Picking up girls (or boys) using a galley: "This is what happens when someone reads a galley (a.k.a. ARC, or advance reading copy) in public: publishing people take notice and begin to wonder about certain things. There’s the galley’s provenance, of course. But what about its owner? Where does he work? Does she like the same things I do? Is he single?"

Felix Gillette looks back at the life and career of Tim Russert. "He was shrewd enough to make his shrewdness appealing. ('He was a ruthless guy,' one of Russert’s former coworkers told The Observer.  read more »

There was a reading last Tuesday night at a performance space in Chelsea attended by a lot of young publishing types. Some of them had jobs at places like Farrar, Straus & Giroux, The New York Review of Books and the Wylie Agency; some worked at Harper’s magazine and others were in creative writing programs. A lot of these people carried bags full of notepads and things. But one man, seated in the front row, did not. He had only a book, which he held tenderly in his hands.

The book was Philip Roth’s Indignation, and it was a beauty! The cover bifurcated diagonally, half orange and half green; the title written in bold, black Franklin Gothic along the middle split; the author’s name, in pale yellow lettering, in the upper-right-hand corner.  read more »

If you remember this year's White House Correspondent's Dinner, you weren't there. Felix Gillette, John Koblin, and Choire Sicha flood the zone in D.C..

Janet Silver is moving from Houghton Mifflin to Nan Talese's imprint at Doubleday. Leon Neyfakh checks in with with Ms. Talese who says, "I called Janet and she sent us a list of the authors she had worked with and the ones who’d said they wanted to come with her, if not immediately then eventually." That list may include Philip Roth and Jonathan Safran Foer. Plus: Islam observers on Wieseltier's Amis review; James Frey's PR Dream Team; Spitzer's bio; Nabokov's unfinished novel.  read more »

On May 1, former Houghton Mifflin publisher Janet Silver starts her new job as an editor at large at Nan Talese’s boutique literary imprint at Doubleday.

Back in January, Ms. Silver and several other editors at Houghton Mifflin were made redundant as part of the company’s merger with Harcourt.

But Ms. Silver and Ms. Talese may have the better end of the stick: The author list Ms. Silver built at Houghton, which included Philip Roth and Jonathan Safran Foer, did not play a small role in Ms. Talese’s desire to recruit her.

“I called Janet and she sent us a list of the authors she had worked with and the ones who’d said they wanted to come with her, if not immediately then eventually,” Ms. Talese said. “We ran down the financials and ... we made an agreement with her that she would stay up there in Massachusetts. It was all done in a rather good fashion.”  read more »

The novelist is in the house! He applauds as his words are married to music.  read more »

Next to The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost seems leaky and limp.  read more »

The last decade and more of American public life will be remembered, among other things, for the tri  read more »

I spent a couple days in New York city this week, including an obligatory meeting with a pseudo-friend. If you don't live in New York, you might not know what a pseudofriend is. New York is full of them. These are the people who want to get out of you a lot of the benefits of a friendship—the exchange of ideas and gossip, the warmth, the removal of loneliness—but without really paying out as a friend in any real generosity of spirit. Truly, they'd just as soon you do badly, and they even act to achieve that result. I'm not talking about friend/rivals. That's an old and honored category of friendship. Old friends know how to negotiate that (ask Gore Vidal and Truman Capote..).

Pseudofriend is a professional category. It's hard for writers to get along that well in N.Y. cause N.Y. is the writers' olympic village. As it's the olympic village for investment analysts, TV people, legal turks, advertising people, etc. I bet they have pseudofriends, too.

Here are two eminent writers holding forth on the subject. First is the late Saul Bellow, as interviewed by Philip Roth in The New Yorker:

I've thought quite a lot about the New York setting of "Seize the Day" and I'm inclined to agree that the loneliness, shabbiness, and depression of the book find a singular match in the uptown Broadway surroundings. I think that for old-time Chicagoans the New Yorkers of "Seize the Day" are emotionally thinner, or one-dimensional. We had fuller or, if you prefer, richer emotions in the Middle West. I think I congratulated myself on having been able to deal with New York, but I never won any of my struggles there, and I never responded with full human warmth to anything that happened there.

Wow. Note that: Bellow never won any of his struggles in New York. (No wonder Roth lives in CT).

Now here's Hemingway in a famous passage from The Green Hills of Africa:

Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art, sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle...

Yes, I'm collecting string on this subject...

I spent a couple days in New York, including meeting with a pseudo-friend. If you don't live in New York, you might not know what a pseudofriend is. New York is full of them. These are the people who want to get out of you a lot of the benefits of a friendship—the exchange of ideas and gossip, the warmth, the removal of loneliness—but without really paying out as a friend behind your back. They'd just as soon you do badly. I'm not talking about friend/rivals. That's an old and honored category of friendship. Old friends know how to negotiate that (ask Gore Vidal and Truman Capote..).

Pseudofriend is a professional category. It's hard for writers to get along that well in N.Y. Because N.Y. is the writers' olympic site. As it's the olympic site for investment analysts, TV people, legal turks, advertising people, etc. I bet they have pseudofriends, too.

Here are two eminent writers holding forth on the subject. First is the late Saul Bellow, as interviewed by Philip Roth in The New Yorker:

I've thought quite a lot about the New York setting of "Seize the Day" and I'm inclined to agree that the loneliness, shabbiness, and depression of the book find a singular match in the uptown Broadway surroundings. I think that for old-time Chicagoans the New Yorkers of "Seize the Day" are emotionally thinner, or one-dimensional. We had fuller or, if you prefer, richer emotions in the Middle West. I think I congratulated myself on having been able to deal with New York, but I never won any of my struggles there, and I never responded with full human warmth to anything that happened there.

Wow. Note that: Bellow never won any of his struggles in New York. (No wonder Roth lives in CT).

Now here's Hemingway in a famous passage from The Green Hills of Africa:

Writers should work alone. They should see each other only after their work is done, and not too often then. Otherwise they become like writers in New York. All angleworms in a bottle, trying to derive knowledge and nourishment from their own contact and from the bottle. Sometimes the bottle is shaped art, sometimes economics, sometimes economic-religion. But once they are in the bottle they stay there. They are lonesome outside of the bottle...

You know the drill. Every year it starts a little bit early: the press releases, the articles, the low level buzz—mostly amid the publicists who write the press releases and the reporters who dutifully recap them. Yes, it's Time's 'Person of Year' time again, and if the consensus mongers are to be believed, this year's 'winner' might be that bitch who's been ruining our lives since the new year.

No, not Paris Hilton: 'Mother Nature.'

But do we really want Mother Nature to win? So many past 'Person of the Year' recipients take an immediate turn south as soon as they win: What if the same fate befalls Mother Nature?

We'll selectively recap the last 78 years, accentuating the negative and eliminating the positive and you can decide for yourself:  read more »

· 2004: George W. Bush (Current approval rating: 37%.) · 2003: The American Soldier (American military deaths since Bush's May 1, 2003 "Mission Accomplished" speech: 1,935.) · 1994: Pope John Paul II (Deceased. Portrayed by Jon Voight.) · 1980: Ronald Reagan (Deceased. Portrayed by James Brolin.) · 1975: American Women (Alito boasted of his '85 work against abortion; Maureen Dowd's new book won't help her pick up guys.) · 1972: Nixon and Kissinger (Former: Impeached. Resigned in disgrace. Deceased. Portrayed in an Oliver Stone movie. Latter: Gently mocked by Jon Stewart.) · 1969: The Middle Americans (Post Election U.S. Map; What's the Matter with Kansas?) · 1963: Martin Luther King, Jr. (Assassinated.) · 1961: John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Assassinated.) · 1952: Elizabeth II (Queen is target for al-Qaida, security sources confirm.) · 1941/1949: Winston Churchill (Deceased. Is Bush the Churchill of the 21st Century?) · 1939/ 1942: Joseph Stalin (Deceased. Posthumously condemned by Martin Amis.) · 1938: Adolf Hitler (Suicide.) · 1935: Haile Selassie (Deceased. Curiously beloved by fraternity members.) · 1927: Charles Lindbergh (Deceased. Son kidnapped; Philip Roth foil.) —Matt Haber

Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) a Jewish American Writer, edited by Derek Rubin.  read more »

Judy Blume snarled! Whatever will we tell our kids?  read more »

The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth. Houghton Mifflin, 391 pages, $26.  read more »

1) Mr. Roth Meets Mr.  read more »

Roger Straus' funeral was a dirgelike gathering at Temple Emanu El with solemn talk from the rabbi a  read more »

Robert Benton's The Human Stain , from a screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, based on the novel by Philip  read more »

Batten down, Manhattan!  read more »

Being bicoastal had always sounded really cool to me-the best of both worlds, the sanest way to endu  read more »

The Second Holocaust. It's a phrase we may have to begin thinking about.  read more »

Wednesday 15th It's still August?!  read more »

The Dying Animal , by Philip Roth.  read more »

The Human Stain , by Philip Roth.  read more »

Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Esthetic Surgery , by Sander L. Gilman.  read more »

Years ago, a poet who was staying at Yaddo, the bucolic artists' and writers' colony in the Adironda  read more »

Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here , by Joseph Heller. Knopf, 259 pages, $24.  read more »

It happened in this newspaper.  read more »

There comes a moment-it is scored in the evolving grain of things-when the balance between a father  read more »