A great American novelist dies
A great American novelist dies
A great American novelist dies
A great American novelist dies
It’s always a mystery why anyone would want to turn a Philip Roth novel into a movie. Despite the author’s immense talent and celebrity, his writing — rich with ideas and emotional conflict, light on concrete action — doesn’t lend itself to the big screen. Recent attempts to render his books cinematically, like “The Human…
The most surprising thing about “Listen Up Philip” is how boring it is, despite the fast-paced dialogue, the New York City setting — heck, even despite Elisabeth Moss. The best part of the movie is the hilarious, pitch-perfect montage of jackets of books “written” by its various characters. Unfortunately, the characters are nowhere near as…
● THE BETRAYERS By David Bezmozgis Little, Brown, 240 pages, $26 David Bezmozgis’s slim new novel, “The Betrayers,” seems at first deceptively simple, then, at second glance, deceptively complex. Set against a historical and political background that becomes too heavy a burden to bear on its slender scaffolding, it is the story of a noble…
1. Iowa’s first naturalized citizen from a foreign country, Alexander Levi of France, was Jewish. He was naturalized in 1837. 2. Iowa resident Moses Bloom, who served as mayor of Iowa City from 1873 to 1875, was the first Jewish mayor of a major American city. He was also the first Jew to serve in…
It's where Albert Einstein lived, but so much more
(JTA) — What is being done to silence this man?” an American rabbi asked in a 1963 letter to the Anti-Defamation League. He was talking about the novelist Philip Roth, whose early novels and short stories cast his fellow American Jews in what some considered a none-too-flattering light. Fast-forward half a century. On Thursday, the…
Philip Roth, one of the world’s most revered novelists, confirmed he will retire from writing and public appearances in a final interview with the BBC. Roth, 81, who has written more than 30 books and won numerous awards, spoke to the BBC for a two-part documentary shot in his hometown of Newark, New Jersey, that…
It’s very hard to persuade a friend watching the clock in an office in Midtown Manhattan that at your artist colony in southeastern Wyoming, you — who are eating food made by a country-club chef, sleeping in a free bed, writing in a handsome studio, and taking walks in a landscape of religious beauty —…
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