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“... connoisseurs of disappointment and self-sabotage, published his first novel, Jernigan, in 1991. Joseph Heller called it a ‘sizzler’ and Michiko Kakutani announced in the New York Times that Gates had ‘established himself as a novelist of the very first order’. The Times profiled him too: ‘“Beckett is my main man,” Mr Gates says in his ...”

“... have to start over again, paying a new court fee. But, he went on (this bit was straight out of Joseph Heller), if I did choose to issue another claim, he would strike it out again, since I had already had ‘one bite of the cherry’. All this could have left me disillusioned. Not a bit of it. The judge was kind, concerned, and clearly trying to do ...”

“... Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by Hemingway’s style couldn’t fail to register the impact of ...”

“... came fully fitted with the miserable wife, brattish children and off-the-peg infidelities of a Joseph Heller novel that was yet to be written. The creed of excellence has a sun-bleached Californian feel, but it is also tuned into the spiritual tradition of ‘Let my people go.’ Excellence replaces the measured outputs of the coerced and managed ...”

“... manuscript that records the epic, for example, also contains poems on the patriarchs Abraham and Joseph, ‘Glosses of Gems on the High Priest’s Breastplate’, and a fable in verse about ‘an old lion’ which seems to have a source in a Hebrew work of the 12th century. Old and new, Yiddish always maintained close ties to other languages. Baumgarten ...”

“... on the Pulitzer jury to award it the prize. As Aldous points out, Arthur Senior was outdone by Joseph Kennedy Sr, who not only had JFK’s undergraduate thesis published, but then made While England Slept a bestseller by buying up thousands of copies and stashing them in a Boston warehouse. Like Schlesinger Senior, Kennedy Senior also strongarmed the head ...”

“... changes in the system. It would clearly take more than a few months of glasnost to persuade Michel Heller and Aleksandr Nekrich that real reform is taking place in the USSR. They are as convinced of the impossibility of genuine change as the most conservative defenders of the status quo. ‘Homo sovieticus began from zero. On 25 October 1917 a new era ...”

“... to fruition by Penguin and the fruits thereof foisted on a gullible public at £7.95 a time. Joseph Shipley’s The Origins of English Words is quite a different kettle of lexical fish: but ‘kettle’ is the word. Anything caught swimming in the Indo-European ocean has been thrown into the pot. The result is an etymological stew which defies culinary ...”

“... and withdrawn – God is a man. There are difficulties with comic novels that draw on the Bible. Joseph Heller’s God Knows sets itself up as the memoir of the ageing David – ‘warrior king, the sweet psalmist of Israel’ – and plays off its contemporary idiom against an ancient story for cheap laughs. David reminisces without ever losing a sense ...”

“... breakthrough and millstone it belongs with Catch-22 (1961) and Slaughterhouse Five (1969). Joseph Heller didn’t publish another novel until 1974, while Vonnegut kept to his established rhythm, producing one every two or three years. Roth stepped up the pace, with Our Gang appearing in 1971, followed in successive years by The Breast, The Great ...”

“... Roth not only edited the series but commissioned introductions from the likes of John Updike and Joseph Brodsky for an extra imprimatur. The series lasted fifteen years, a labour of literary world citizenship that seems to have been lost in the passage of time, perhaps because American culture has never been more parochial, tuned out and ...”