“George Pelecanos: Northline by Willy Vlautin.” “Roddy Doyle: The Plot Against America by Philip Roth.” “Andrea Levy: English Passengers by Matthew Kneale.” These authors and many more have chosen their favorite book of the past dec...

I admire Roth for being able to discipline rage into something that makes us feel smarter just for reading it.

Who are the great baseball writers? Roger Angell, Bill James, George Will (eing a lifetime Chicago Cubs fan has to count for something). Oh yeah -- and Philip Roth in Portnoy's Complaint.

Portnoy's Complaint is, after all, a portrait of the artist as a young shark. He's constantly on the move; even if his body holds still long enough to lie on the analyst's couch, that brain is a perpetual motion machine.

Remember all that hype about blogs and YouTube ushering in the next millionaire writers and movie stars? Fat chance. Talent scouts are giving up on finding the next Philip Roth or Wes Anderson on the web, according to the Wall Stree...

Remember all that hype about blogs and YouTube ushering in the next millionaire writers and movie stars? Fat chance. Talent scouts are giving up on finding the next Philip Roth or Wes Anderson on the web, according to the Wall Stree...

Behold! The international trailer for The Ghost Writer, aka the thriller that Roman Polanski was polishing up while in Swiss prison, has hit the internets. It has nothing to do with Nathan Zuckerman or Philip Roth, rather, it’s base...

Leon Wieseltier opens his essay on Philip Roth’s The Humbling at the New Republic’s new book-review site with this bit of throat-clearing: So much contemporary American fiction also seems researched, worked up, instrumentalized, by...

Required reading: When She Was Good, which can be reduced, for those who prefer sound bites, to the story of a girl who had no choice.

I noted Katie Roiphe's contrast of the carnality of the 20th century's Great Male Novelists (eg Philip Roth) and their contemporary counterparts (eg Jonathan Safran Foer) last week. Ross offers some historical context to her argumen...

Dutifully Roth subjects his madman to a series of increasingly play-like situations, each tragically calibrated to make him lose his mind.

The cuddle trumps sodomy!  At The New York Times, the controversial post-feminist Katie Roiphe explores the difference between the descriptions of sex in the last generation of American male novelists (Philip Roth, John Updike, Norm...

Katie Roiphe has a very long, very erudite diatribe in the New York Times comparing the great and virile male novelists of yesteryear (Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Mailer etc.) to our overthinking dude writers of today (Dave Egg...

By Philip Brewer This post was prompted by a reader question, but it's an issue that many people face — we see versions of it all the time in the forums. So, I thought I'd walk through what I think is the best way to approach any p...

The January issue of Commentary is out, and Philip Roth’s novella The Humbling is reviewed by Sam Sacks, editor of Open Letters Monthly. I am sick with envy. I had begged for first shot at Roth’s latest, but my reputation as an unre...

Katie Roiphe's NYTBR essay on sex and American fiction is full of holes (Kunkel, Franzen, and Foer the heirs apparent to Roth, Updike, and Mailer?). But it does make at least one good point vis a vis sex in the current generation of...

Bad novels happen to good people, and vice versa, and I honestly don't care what kind of a husband Philip Roth was as long as he wakes up every morning and goes to work.

Semester grades were due yesterday. I submitted them on time, and then fell into a deep and untroubled sleep. I was suffering from the exhaustion of undergraduate prose.This morning a student in my Philip Roth seminar wrote to prote...

The story is such a familiar, valiant mess, or better, a sprawling but disciplined rendering of a mess; 661 pages, and I am starting to regret that it will end.

Oh, goodie, it's another Philip Roth adaptation about an aging man awakened in life through an affair with a much younger woman! This one is based on Roth's latest, The Humbling, and while I'm sure the writing in the novel is great ...