Philip Roth may have retired, but that doesn’t mean he’s done giving interviews. The author recently sat down with the editor of a Swedish newspaper, who talked with him about misogyny, Sabbath’s Theater and the need for “obstinacy” in a writer. (Related: our own Hannah Gersen reviewed Roth Unbound.) (h/t The Paris Review)
“Anything but the perfect external man”
Code-Switching Patchworks
Over at Ploughshares, Daniel Peña traces a parallel between Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Gloria Anzaldúa’s hybrid text Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. As he puts it, “To separate Anzaldúa from the larger canon (and subsequently from those books she influenced) is to ignore her contribution to American literature. It’s to say she doesn’t belong in that kind of highbrow conversation, which she so obviously does—even Nelson acknowledges that she does.”
●
●
The Inventor
There’s a new biography of Angela Carter on shelves. Is it worth your time, even if you’re not a fan? In The New York Review of Books, Alison Lurie gives the book a thorough read.
●
●
One comment:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Win Zak Smith’s Gravity’s Rainbow
The Quarterly Conversation is holding a contest for readers. They’ll be giving away a hardcover copy of Zak Smith’s illustrated Gravity’s Rainbow.
●
●
A Complete Reading
Recommended Reading: From The New Yorker, it’s Tessa Hadley on fiction as anthropology: “When I’m writing a story, its world is thin, unsatisfactory, untrue, until I start to find my way to those details, those ‘small cultural signifiers.’ As these accumulate on the page, the life in the piece thickens, the details breed, and the story begins to stir.”
●
●
A Brief History of Library Theft
From 400-year-old bibles to John F. Kennedy's rocking chair, library thieves have stolen countless artifacts over the years.
●
●
●
Trololololol
“They said banning me from Twitter would finish me off. Just as I predicted, the opposite has happened.” Talking Points Memo reports that Simon & Schuster is moving forward with plans to publish a book by Breitbart News editor and white nationalist Milo Yiannopoulos, whose extended harassment of comedian Leslie Jones finally led to his expulsion from Twitter last year. Critics of the publishing house have called for its boycott, including some of its own authors.
While I admire Philip Roth work, I can’t avoid thinking that his need to read his own work, and then to grace us with his revelation upon doing so is hopelessly narcissistic and arrogant. Reading these “revelations” is like listening to a parent go on and on about her children.
Ultimately, it’s how the world judges your children that matters. Not you. Is Roth’s work misogynist? I don’t think so. But a lot of people do. Too bad, Mr. Roth. That question will have to sort itself out over time. We might as well listen to Shakespeare defend himself against accusations of antisemitism in the Merchant of Venice. The play will engage us, if not forever, for a long time. But for all his monumental influence, the great bard doesn’t get a vote in defining what his work means. The same goes for Philip Roth, or any writer.
Let it go, Roth! Get a life! Indulge the retirement you promised yourself and the world. If there is rhetoric in your fiction, that’s there for others to sort out. Your clever logic in interviews after you chose to set your work on its way, disabuses the reading public of none of its illusions.