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“... of influential mavericks – from Nabokov and Henry Miller to William Burroughs, James Baldwin, Philip Roth and the Beats – had been chipping away at the old taboos. But it still took courage to challenge the stultifying pieties of middlebrow culture. Being a woman didn’t help. (Does it ever?) Over the course of an admittedly strange and somewhat ...”

“... do I.21 March. Reading a book about William Morris and Kelmscott, I come across a reminiscence by Philip Webb, who remarked to W.R. Lethaby: ‘The best of those times was that there was no covetousness; all went into the common stock … and then we were all such boys.’ This is how I remember my early days working for the BBC in the 1960s. John ...”

“... had become friends with many writers, especially Mordecai Richler; now Moore became friends with Philip Roth and Neil Simon. They divided their time between Manhattan and Long Island. Moore won prizes, sold movie rights and began to achieve a sort of fame, but he lived in those years in a world he grew to distrust: ‘I lived in Greenwich Village ...”

“... bordering on ‘minstrelsy’, contrasted sharply with the work of Bellow and Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, who had ‘not shown a great interest in the shadow of the Shoah’.A strenuously willed affiliation with the Shoah has also marked and diminished much American journalism about Israel. More consequentially, the secular-political religion of the ...”

“... tall, the world’s smallest mobile adult human) lacks access to personal transportation. Cadence Roth, known as Cady, is a dwarf whose show-business aspirations were both fulfilled and strangled at birth, ten years before the action of the book, by a starring but paradoxical role in a classic film for children of all ages, Mr Woods. She played an elf who ...”

“... and deadly serious purposes. The narrator has parallels with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Philip Roth’s Alex Portnoy (both inheritors of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man). The accident on the set of the war movie alludes to Invisible Man, and the arrogant, racist Auteur takes the place of the white man who lands Ellison’s narrator in ...”

“... San Francisco on 7 October 1955. Michael McClure who also read that night along with Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Philip Lamantia, describes the poem’s impact in Scratching the Beat Surface (1982): I hadn’t seen Allen in a few weeks and I had not heard Howl – it was new to me. Allen began in a small and intensely ...”

“... was certain his appendix was about to collapse.’Many illustrious friends and acquaintances – Philip Roth, Nadine Gordimer, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis – make cameos in Brennan’s biography, but there is little sense of the texture of these relationships. Of Said’s personal life, we learn even less. After his second marriage in 1970, other women ...”

“... a counterlife, with fiction and fact constantly ducking and weaving around each other. As in Philip Roth’s novel of that name, moments that look like intimate revelations are shown to be virtuoso displays of formalist trickery, and vice versa. For the first sixty or so pages it is possible to read Arabesques as an intelligently contemporary ...”

“... that set off the tingle of association. The dialogue​ with the gravedigger in Philip Roth’s Everyman is one of the finest things in his late work, a scene of stoic eloquence, with the gravedigger (black, over fifty, with a precise style of speech like a Southerner’s) explaining in detail what he does: I don’t use a machine ...”

“... closer to the outlines of Theroux’s history. Neither book is imaginable without the precedent of Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound (1981) – in which Zuckerman’s succès de scandale Carnovsky stands in for Portnoy’s Complaint – and The Counterlife (1986). Theroux followed Roth into a hall of mirrors from which ...”

“... which Cohen-Solal finds ‘a more opaque and less ethnically identifiable patronymic than “Roth”, the one picked by his brothers’. The name also seems a clever piece of personal branding, like Texaco. Rothko moved, during the early 1940s, from realism to recognisable mythical subjects drawn from Greek and Christian iconography. By 1944, he had ...”

“... recently to name a book that made her laugh, Ferrante went with Portnoy’s Complaint, and like Philip Roth’s her novels are concerned, in a way that’s clever and distanced but also consciously intense, with giving voice to parts of the self that not everyone puts on display. There are other similarities: a provincial city – Naples, Newark ...”

“... that, in his own small way, he would have given it a hard time. I am not sure what his reaction to Philip Roth’s I Married a Communist would have been. He would doubtless have admired the dedication of Roth’s ‘pure’ Communist, O’Day, but it is to Ira Ringold that my father would have instinctively warmed ...”

“... of privilege.’ We have heard this credo from Cisneros, and we hear it, via McGurl, from Philip Roth:It ‘did not dawn on’ [Roth] that the ‘anecdotes and observations’ of his boyhood in lower-middle-class Newark with which he entertained his highbrow friends ‘might be made into ...”