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“... And he is generous in his assessment of the degree to which books are taken seriously in America. Philip Roth, a notable survivor from a slightly later generation, suggests, in the course of one of this fresh instalment of Paris Review interviews,1 that the USA is a society where, for a writer, ‘everything goes and nothing matters.’ Far from being ...”

“... a dolphin or a bear or a moose appears. The dolphins sometimes kill celebrities, Sean Penn and Philip Roth as well as Elijah Wood. Eeeee Eee Eeee seems vaguely adolescent; its ideal reader is probably 18 or 19 years old. (The New York Public Library shelves the book in the ‘Young Adult’ section.) And its long closing scene, in which the unnamed ...”

“... reimagining, or daydreaming, or fantasy. Kureishi’s account is littered with famous names (Philip Roth tells him he should stick to fiction rather than films because of his verbal precision; Raymond Carver appears at Bill Buford’s for dinner; Claire Bloom has a passing and unjustified role). If there’s an excuse for the name-dropping, it’s ...”

“... in a prose that is always fresh, nubile and unwitherable’. (Yes, it does say ‘nubile’.) Philip Roth is admired, though Amis seems uncharacteristically terrorised by Sabbath’s Theater: ‘an amazing tantrum . . . You toil on, looking for the clean bits.’ Mailer is ‘grandiose and crass’. And so on. It’s all deeply interesting and ...”

“... household names in Britain until he published them at Jonathan Cape. His stable has included Philip Roth, García Márquez, McEwan, Martin Amis, Barnes, Rushdie, Vonnegut, Chatwin, Fowles, Deighton and, Maschler does not fear to admit, Jeffrey Archer. The title he was most excited to publish was Catch 22, a novel he took on after more myopic others ...”

“... not cool enough, or edgy enough, their delight in the ridiculous is too obvious. When Tim Roth, as the cop in Reservoir Dogs, explains to his mentor that the diamond-heist gang have code-names based on colours, and he is Mr Orange, his mentor repeats the name before his next speech – this is not in the screenplay – and can’t help ...”

“... an old literary-historical puzzle about how to categorise Hemingway. He never seemed to fit Philip Rahv’s division of American authors into ‘palefaces’ and ‘redskins’. Against the ‘redskin’ values – his boxing, fishing, outdoor living, love of bullfights, courage under fire – the careful critic could juxtapose the ...”

“... the first expression of love’. In his current seclusion he is heartened by the example of Philip Roth, for whom an early accusation of being anti-semitic was the real beginning of his imaginative ‘thralldom’ to Jewish culture. Rushdie, too, seems compelled to quarrel with, and to crave forgiveness from, what he loves most. ‘What I know of ...”

“... been found: it is now just another eloquent absence. The Messiah of Stockholm is dedicated to Philip Roth, and it seems to me that in its treatment of this theme the novel is related to Roth’s The Ghost Writer. In that book, Roth’s writer-hero Nathan Zuckerman met a girl he ...”

“... one my age can go on living for long.’ No recent poet has raged so movingly against what Philip Roth has called the ‘massacre’ of old age: ‘Here’s a pun – It took my breath away! Lung cancer? Breath away?’ But Poems 1959-2009, doorstop though it is, doesn’t feel like an epitaph. ‘I spend most of my time not dying./That’s what ...”

“... he’s a Fascist … he can write’) to Kurt Vonnegut (‘every writer is in his debt’) to Philip Roth (‘Céline is my Proust!’) have declared their loyalty to his radical voice. Normance was probably unknown to these writers, but its style and ambitions would be largely familiar. We need only look at a single page of this book or of any of ...”

“... for the first International Man Booker Prize for career achievement, alongside Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Gabriel García Márquez, Margaret Atwood et al. Consequently, it is sometimes seen as surprising that she is so little read in Britain. Her formidable essays have been published and admired here; but, of her nine works of fiction, only The Bear ...”

“... have a theatrical pungency strongly reminiscent of Babel, filtered perhaps through the early Philip Roth. This collection of linked stories is narrated by Mark Berman, a little boy in the first four tales, and a teenager in the final three. Over the course of the book we get to know Mark’s parents, Bella and Roman, and various relatives and ...”

“... is that ‘writing is never spontaneous.’ So too, as he pointed out in an interview with Philip Roth, the truth told in The Truce is ‘filtered truth’, each episode having been ‘preceded by countless verbal versions’ and retouchings as it was recounted by Levi to his friends and family. Levi’s writing about the Holocaust and its ...”

“... drown in my own shit’. It’s vintage P-funk apocalyptic, a black, psychedelic version of what Philip Roth, in American Pastoral, called ‘the indigenous American berserk’. Then Maggot Brain comes up a second time, when Jason listens to it in the late 1990s. Now, it’s ‘admittedly awesome’, ‘drop-dead sad and lovely’; ‘It sounds like his ...”