More in ‘Saul Bellow’

Greenberg, the new film from writer/director Noah Baumbach and starring Ben Stiller, comes out today. Considering it last week, Tablet Magazine’s Marissa Brostoff reported that while “there is little overt Jewishness” (except for the title!), Stiller’s protagonist fits squarely in the venerable tradition of the Jewish shlemiel. (Among other things, he writes letters to random ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, Staff Writer Marissa Brostoff arguesthat J.D. Salinger’s Glass family stories are indelibly Jewish in a way that is nonetheless quite different from those by contemporaries Bellow, Mailer, and Roth: “Zooey has plenty of complaints, but Portnoy’s is not one of them.” As pork has become increasingly trendy in the foodie world, ...

A young man taking a long, languorous bath is paid a visit by his mother, who sits down (presumably on the toilet seat) to chat, and, despite her son’s half-hearted attempts to get rid of her, remains there for most of the next 48 pages. She’s come to talk about the young man’s college-aged sister, ...

For years, I have been reading Michael Greenberg’s remarkable column in the Times Literary Supplement and wondering what the English make of it. The New York Jewish quality of Greenberg’s take on the writer’s life, under the rubric “Freelance,” is emphasized by the way he takes turns writing the column with an English poet, Hugo ...

The British author Adam Thirlwell, acclaimed a promising young novelist by Granta in 2003, has just published The Escape, and the reviews in the London papers are mixed. The story borrows from Philip Roth (though he thanks Saul Bellow in his acknowlegements): there’s lots of sex and the protagonist, Raphael Haffner, a London-raised Lithuanian Jew ...

It may well happen like this:
You’ll be sitting in the Pain Quotidien café enjoying a cup of hot apple cider. A reporter seated across from you will consult her notepad.
“So, how does it feel to be a Jewish writer?” she’ll ask.
You’ll sip your cider, then say you’ve never thought too hard about that. You’ll offer ...

In the 1940s, Isaac Rosenfeld was a rising star in literary circles, recognized as a sharp, deep, and original thinker. His admirers included Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Diana Trilling, and other luminaries. Many people considered him to be more promising than his childhood friend Saul Bellow.
But while Bellow went on to great success, Rosenfeld ...

Bernard Malamud in 1957
Not long after I moved to New York, I found myself browsing one day at the Strand. Amid the piles of remainders, I came across The Complete Stories of Bernard Malamud, a hefty volume that had been released a few years earlier, in 1997. I’d heard of Malamud, of course, but for ...

Few crackpots are exhumed and reinterred as regularly as the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. It is not clear why. One explanation is comedic: Reich was, and continues to be, an enormously entertaining figure. His early career, when he was still on cordial terms with sanity, was marked by pronouncements such as, “There is only one thing ...

In a public statement Mr. Robert Penn Warren recently observed that he liked to write in a foreign country, “where the language is not your own, and you are forced into yourself in a special way.” When I began to write The Adventures of Augie March I was living in Paris, where circumstances made me ...