Museum of Arts & Design

The Prince of UES/Hamptons prep, J. McLaughlin, purveyor of D-ring ribbon belts with ubiquitous skulls and martini glasses, is upgrading its vibe and debuting its modern take on the Ivy League look with a preview at the Museum of Arts & Design, that freaky-modern masterpiece or eyesore—you judge—originally called the Gallery of Modern Art, which the late squandered-millionaire Huntington Hartford built in 1964 to house his massive collection of 19th- and 20th-century art. That has nothing to do with embroidered coral-colored corduroy pants and Lilly Pulitzer-like patterned shirts, but we just had to mention it.

The Museum of Arts & Design, 2 Columbus Circle, seventh floor, (212) 956-3535, 8:30am-5:30pm, by invitation only.

Philip Roth turns 80 this month, and two documentaries have been made to honor his important position in American literature. One of them, Philip Roth: Unmasked, is debuting at Film Forum on Wednesday, March 13, and runs through Tuesday, March 19. Mr. Roth recently announced that he no longer wants to write novels, so the film makes for a good excuse to look back on his work with the knowledge that he won’t be doing much more of it.

Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, (212) 727-8110.

"I join Twitter today. It's easy..." @PhilipRothOffic tweeted on Christmas Eve. The account followed various reporters at The New York Times and The New Yorker, as well as other publications with "New York" in the title (including our own). Some responded by wondering if Mr. Roth's appearance on Twitter did, in fact, herald the end of days. Fellow novelist Salman Rushdie, remained skeptical. "Until there's a little blue tick by his name I will not believe it," tweeted Mr. Rushdie.

Others were just flattered by the follow.

"Thanks for the follow. I'm a fan," tweeted Times public editor Margaret Sullivan.

Edward Champion, managing editor of Reluctant Habits, became skeptical when he noticed that there was a Philip Roth Twitter feed and that the tweet in question didn't seem up to Mr. Roth's usual quality. Mr. Champion attributed some of the widespread suspension of disbelief to trusted sources--including Ms. Sullivan--validating the account.

"I was dubious about the possibility that noted luddite Philip Roth would join Twitter," Mr. Champion said. The prose and the fact that the account was not following Joyce Carol Oates or Roth biographer Blake Bailey further set off warning signs. Mr. Champion emailed Mr. Bailey, who confirmed that the account was fake.

"The real Philip Roth--yes, him--would have it known that he has NO twitter account, and it is MOST unlikely he ever shall," Mr. Bailey tweeted yesterday.

Who knew that the job of an official biographer extended to quashing Twitter rumors?

After finding out that it was a fake Twitter account, Ms. Sullivan responded, via Twitter, today: "Thanks to those who (ever so gently) pointed out that I mistook a fake Philip Roth account for the real thing. Guilty as charged." "Not much of a story really: it's a fake Philip Roth twitter account," Mr. Bailey explained in an email to the Observer this morning. "Mr. Roth himself is not at all sure what Twitter is, and in any case (as he emailed me yesterday) would rather people not go around impersonating him--outside his novels anyway."

The whole incident does remind us an awful lot of the plot of Operation Shylock. And now, the fake Twitter account is even threatening to start writing. "I will post here a very short story, titled '140'. Soon," tweeted @PhilipRothOffic. Maybe this incident will be enough for Mr. Roth to come out of retirement. But don't expect to see the novelist on Twitter. Ever.

Philip Roth.

The phrase “it’s better to burn out than to fade away” has been a rallying cry in music since Neil Young crooned it over 30 years ago. But it’s writers who seem to best embody the sentiment: the burnouts who did themselves in, like Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf, tend to be romanticized long after their deaths by those who believe an untimely end completes some sort of narrative of depression; the ones who fade, the writers who keep pushing out words till their last breath, may not be eulogized, but at least they get to spend their golden years doing what they (presumably) love.

Last month, Philip Roth, one of America’s greatest living writers and its reigning curmudgeon, took a very different route toward career conclusion: he quit. The 79-year-old author of 27 novels, dozens of short stories and countless essays, and the recipient of nearly every major literary award save the Nobel Prize, told an interviewer for the French publication Les Inrocks, “To tell you the truth, I’m done.” His 2010 novel Nemesis would be his last book.

Surprisingly, it took a month for the American media to pick up on the news that one of its literary lions was putting down his pen. Salon “broke” the news last week by using an Internet program to translate Mr. Roth’s quotes into English. And then things got stranger: there was no big blowout to celebrate a life in letters, no gold watch presented to the retiree, no jersey hung from the rafters. His retirement was a quiet affair—he had done enough, he said, and didn’t want to bang out books anymore. He is one of the rare novelists able to say, “I studied, I taught, I wrote and I read. With the exclusion of almost everything else. Enough is enough!”

But if you’re one of the most acclaimed authors alive, the type who can walk into a bookstore and grab five new works of fiction with a blurb claiming the author is influenced by your work, does it really matter, after all this time, that you want to stop? For most writers, the answer would be no; everybody deserves to call it quits on his own terms, and it’s better to ride into the sunset than to write garbage books simply because you’re a household name. But in the case of Mr. Roth, there is something meaningful in his quiet exit. It closes the door on the Golden Era of Jewish-American Literature.

To say that the postwar era has been good for Jewish writers is an understatement. Jewish-American literature after the Second World War has both changed the course of American letters and helped forge a new, post-Holocaust Jewish identity. Mr. Roth is part of the school of novelists, poets, playwrights, essayists and songwriters that includes Grace Paley, Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Bernard Malamud, Leonard Cohen, Cynthia Ozick, Edward Lewis Wallant, Arthur Miller, Joseph Heller, Leonard Michaels and the Canadian-born, American-raised Saul Bellow, whose opening line to his 1953 breakout novel The Adventures of Augie March is not only of the same iconic stature as Moby-Dick’s “Call me Ishmael” but reads like a rallying cry for Jewish assimilation just a few years removed from Hitler’s massacre: “I am an American, Chicago born.”

In one sense, Mr. Roth’s exit is merely symbolic. The light of the Golden Age has been fading for years—but his announcement is an extinguishing of the embers. In 1977, several years before Mr. Roth had published a single Zuckerman novel, Irving Howe, another of the great Jewish-American intellectual voices, wrote that “American Jewish fiction has probably moved past its high point.” He went on to say that most American Jewish writing up until that point had drawn heavily from the immigrant experience, that it “must suffer a depletion of recourses, a thinning-out of materials and memories.” Howe believed that Jewish writers had become removed from centuries of suffering, and the mother tongue of Yiddish was being forgotten. Mr. Roth himself was the child of first-generation American parents, but the shtetl was never far behind. His earlier writing, along with the work of many of his contemporaries, gives a glimpse into the growing pains of a culture that was finally able to stop worrying about Spanish Inquisitions, pogroms, Hitler.

But Philip Roth’s retirement is significant because he is the Jewish-American writer. His lackluster books from the last decade or so notwithstanding, his body of work represents the most extensive document of the Jewish experience in postwar America. The short story “Defenders of the Faith,” collected in his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959) is about a Jewish soldier who tries to manipulate his sergeant—a fellow Jew—by preying on their shared ethnic backgrounds to keep from getting shipped off to the Pacific. It caused an uproar in the Jewish community for its portrayal of the soldier, Sheldon Grossbart, which many felt upheld the long-standing stereotype that Jews are cunning and greedy. Mr. Roth saw it differently, stating in 1963 that his character was “represented not as the stereotype of the Jew, but the Jew who acts like the stereotype, offering back to his enemies their vision of him[.]”

Six years later came the commercial success of Portnoy’s Complaint, a novel that prompted its own share of controversy. Life magazine pointed to “the book’s pungent language” and “its preoccupations, foremost among which is the terrible sin of onanism.” Alexander Portnoy masturbating with a piece of raw liver was on par with anything Lenny Bruce had thought up. After that book, Mr. Roth churned out at least one great novel in every decade since the release of Goodbye, Columbus. He held up the center of American fiction, Jewish or otherwise.

So what can we expect in his absence? Mr. Roth’s announcement comes at a time when post-Golden Age American Jewish literature is reaching its own awkward adolescence. The compulsive masturbation in Portnoy’s Complaint made subversion the centerpiece of Mr. Roth’s style, and it seems as if today’s younger American-born Jewish writers are trying to one-up his crudeness. The title story of Nathan Englander’s 2012 collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank focuses on two Jewish couples, one Hasidic and the other secular, getting high and drunk and playing the “Anne Frank game”: they try to guess which of their gentile neighbors would hide them in the event of a second Holocaust. The entire book follows Jewish characters transforming from victim to victimizers in a far less subtle way than Sheldon Grossbart in “Defenders of the Faith.” But Mr. Englander’s “Anne Frank game” is tame in comparison with Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy, a novel, also released earlier this year, about an everyday schmuck named Solomon Kugel. In it, our David Kepesh-esque antihero buys a farmhouse and finds, to his surprise, that a woman who claims to be Anne Frank is alive and living in his attic. This is a literary gotcha at least comparable with the absurdity of Mr. Roth’s novella The Breast, in which Kepesh wakes up to discover he has turned into, well, a 155-pound breast.  (An Anne Frank-like character also appears in Mr. Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 novel The Ghost Writer.) But after the initial shock value, the obviousness of Mr. Auslander’s metaphor—that Jews are unable to move past the systematic death of six million of their people—grows stale. Reviews of the book were mixed, but many of them cited Philip Roth as an influence.

So what, exactly, does it mean to be influenced by Philip Roth? His body of work is so diverse that he’s a presence every writer must assimilate and, if successful, live down. Joshua Cohen’s 800-page 2010 novel Witz begins with a Rothian gimmick—the protagonist is the last Jew on Earth after a mysterious plague wipes out the world’s chosen people, making him a bizarre update of the solitary but virile man who inhabits so much of Mr. Roth’s fiction. But from there the book is more concerned with language itself, a stream of consciousness of made-up words and impenetrable sentences; it reads, at times, like a deliberate swipe at what Mr. Roth called, in his 1963 essay “Writing About Jews,” the “promiscuous instincts” of modern man.

Stepping away from his more obvious descendants, it becomes clear how inescapable Mr. Roth’s style has become. At a glance, Sheila Heti, a Canadian of Hungarian-Jewish descent, whose most recent novel, How Should a Person Be?, includes, more than once, the decidedly anti-Rothian dismissal “just another man who wants to teach me something,” does not seem a likely candidate for inheriting Mr. Roth’s mantle. But her book is filled, even unconsciously, with Rothian gestures. First, there’s the graphic sex. Consider the two writers’ dueling takes on fellatio. Mr. Roth, from My Life As a Man: “Her eyes leveled on his exposed member and her tongue out and moving. ‘I want to be your whore,’ she whispered to him (without prompting too), while on the back terrace her Mother told his mother how adorable Sharon looked in the winter coat they’d bought for her that afternoon.” Ms. Heti: “I know boyfriends get really excited when they can touch the soft flesh at the back of your throat. At these times, I just try to breathe through my nose and not throw up on their cock. I did vomit a little the other day, but I kept right on sucking.” Then there is the blurring of fiction and autobiography, a theme that haunts many contemporary novelists. “Sheila Heti” is the protagonist of How Should a Person Be?, just as “Philip Roth” is the hero of The Plot Against America, navigating the halls of Weequahic High School, where the real Philip Roth got a diploma.

The reviews of Ms. Heti’s novel—and there were plenty—did not lump her into this tricky category of Jewish Fiction, and certainly didn’t mention Mr. Roth, whose impress ranges from obvious to subliminal in most contemporary fiction. There is still a lingering obsession with what makes a Jewish writer or a Jewish book—an idea that Mr. Roth helped form—but his exit from the literary world certainly puts an end to the era of the Jewish Writer as we know it. He may not have been as well known without the visibility awarded to a Jew writing about Jews in the years after World War II, but as a lesson to anybody who tries to label himself or herself a Jewish Writer in these post-Roth years, Mr. Roth’s work will be remembered for its quality first. Perhaps this is his greatest achievement. He made Jewish fiction mainstream, allowing Jewish writers to focus on something other than just being Jewish.

editorial@observer.com

If you write an open letter and post it on a New Yorker blog, you should expect a response. Especially if you are Philip Roth.

Mr. Roth created a medium-sized stir when he discovered Wikipedia and wrote them an open letter on The New Yorker’s Pageturner blog two weeks ago.  Mr. Roth took issue with Wikipedia’s entry for his book The Human Stain – the character of Coleman Silk, the professor who “passes” as white was inspired by Mr. Roth’s friend Melvin Tumin, not the author and literary figure Anatole Broyard, as Wikipedia (and frankly everyone else) assumed. Despite the fact that Mr. Roth felt he was an authority on his own characters that he created, Wikipedia required secondary sourcing. It should be noted that the Wikipedia entry has been updated.

Mr. Broyard’s story did seem similar to Mr. Roth’s fictitious character. But no matter. The author used his New Yorker letter to explain the conceit of fiction:

“Novel writing is for the novelist a game of let’s pretend. Like most every other novelist I know, once I had what Henry James called “the germ”—in this case, Mel Tumin’s story of muddleheadedness at Princeton—I proceeded to pretend and to invent…”

Well, not everybody was convinced. Bliss Broyard, the daughter of suspected inspiration Anatole (and author of her own book about her father’s hidden ethnicity) has taken to Facebook to quibble with Mr. Roth.

The Facebook missive is pasted below, courtesy of Salon. We, alas, are not Facebook friends with Ms. Broyard, and now fear we never will be.

The week before last, someone posted on my timeline this Open Letter from Philip Roth explaining that my dad was not the inspiration for Coleman Silk, the “passing” professor, in the Human Stain. I considered responding publicly with my own open letter but have decided not to. I’m trying more and more to find that balance between serenity and engagement in my life, and picking a public fight with Phillip Roth didn’t seem like it would further either goal in a meaningful way. But neither does it feel completely right to sit quietly on the sidelines. SO FBFs, in case you care, I did have a few thoughts I wanted to share:

1. There was a legitimate reason that many reviewers of the book and movie drew the comparison to my dad’s life. Not only are there many similarities between Silk and my father’s basic biographies, but many of these details Roth could have known (despite his protests otherwise) by glancing through my father’s two memoirs, Intoxicated by My Illness and (especially) Kafka Was the Rage, or Henry Louis Gates’ very long and often-commented-upon piece about my father’s racial identity in The New Yorker, all of which were published in the years prior or during when Roth claims to have started work on the Human Stain. Roth could have also learned them from my dad himself, since their time together was more substantial than Roth describes, including a long walk in Central Park in the 1980s.

2. I think it’s completely reasonable that Roth should be allowed to have the last word on who inspires his characters and even obfuscate about the sources if he wants to… BUT I don’t think it’s reasonable that Roth gets to dictate what conclusions other people draw about his characters, which is effectively what he was trying to do with his objection to Wikipedia’s description of the book as “allegedly” having been inspired by my dad. Many many reviewers did make this allegation… Very often if I describe my book about my dad to a new acquaintance, he or she will comment, “Oh, it’s just like that novel by Philip Roth…”

3. Roth was in fact “in the company” of a “single member of Broyard’s family”– at least once. It was November 23rd, 1988, at James Atlas’s annual party on the eve of the Macy’s Day Parade. I was 22, it was my first and last literary party with my dad, and I was terrified. But I have a very clear memory of him pulling me across the room to meet Roth. “Bliss,” my father said, rather pompously, “this is one of our most important American novelists. “ He turned to regard me. “So lithe and pale,” he pronounced. “Like a ghost.” It was a brief encounter–one I’m not surprised that he might have forgotten–but I am sure you all can understand why I haven’t.

After informing the AP that the 16 members of the academy had reached a decision, permanent secretary Peter Englund addressed the much-alleged "pro-Europe" agenda that has prevented an American from winning the lit prize since Toni Morrison captured it in 1993. Englund denied that there's any agenda, but admitted that the panelists may succumb to "subconscious bias," as all of them are European. "That is a problem," he said. "But we are aware of it."

This year, Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates are among the American writers poised to end the drought. But bear in mind that history is against the U.S. in this respect, and bet accordingly. 

“When you publish a book,” Philip Roth once wrote in The New York Times Book Review, “it’s the world’s book. The world edits it.” Not really, actually. When Mr. Roth publishes a book, he edits it. And the Transom has proof!

We were lucky enough to receive both the uncorrected proofs and the finished text of The Humbling, Mr. Roth’s 28th novel, which tells the story of aging out-of-work actor Simon Axler and his relationship with a 40-year-old lesbian named Pegeen. In an attempt to crack the code of the author’s heretofore invisible stylistic development, we compared the two versions. Here are some of Mr. Roth’s most substantial edits (a publicist for the publisher, Houghton Mifflin, confirmed they were his).

• Axler’s age is changed from 65 to 66, an even 10 years Roth’s junior.

• The narrative describes Axler’s sense-memory technique in his early acting classes. The airy description, “You try to summon up what it smells like there, is it cold there, is it warm, is it outside—they were very big in class in those days on your using all your senses and setting up things you can connect to,” is cut, leaving only, “Practice making things real.”

• When Pegeen’s old lover, a jealous college dean, visits Axler’s house unannounced, the narrative jumps inside Axler’s mind, revealing his thoughts: “No, it could not be easy for the loser to stand there and confront the person who had won,” he thinks. The final edit leaves it at that, but the earlier draft also interprets the scene for us: “The sick desperation of facing the new lover must be all but overwhelming.”

• The most bizarre part of the novel comes near the end, when Pegeen and Axler decide to bring a woman home with them from a bar. In the proofs: “There was something dangerous about it.” The final edit changes “dangerous” to “primitive.”

• Pegeen’s father runs a community theater in the capital of Michigan, a place for which Mr. Roth apparently has little love: “Lansing, Michigan” is changed to “middle of nowhere.”

• Throughout, Mr. Roth has removed commentary on the events of the novel. This is most apparent in the frantic ending, from which the following have been cut entirely:

“Yes, he was fucking up this role too. Surely there was some way for him to take being spurned other than by pursuing the most debilitating course.”

“This is the stuff not of high tragedy but of the funny papers, the aged suitor from the funny papers found wanting by the busty blond showgirl whom he has plied with jewelry and showered with clothes from the swankiest shops!”

“It was as though life had a mind of its own, indifferent if not maliciously hostile to his aims—as though he himself hadn’t the faintest idea of what was behind all that was going on or of what share of the blame for his failure was his.”

In publishing, this signals the start of a season that many believe has the best chance of any in recent memory to redeem the industry after one of its darkest years, and to show that, even in 2009, big, beautiful hit books are still possible. 

Many publishers are saying their fall catalogs are their strongest in years, and after last fall, an unqualified disaster that left the industry demoralized and diminished, much is at stake as their hopes are tested. As one publishing veteran put it, “if this fall doesn’t work out, a lot more of us will not have jobs next year.”

Scribner has it all on the line for Audrey Niffenegger’s new novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, for which they paid $5 million in March. HarperCollins has Michael Crichton’s posthumous pirate book. Knopf Doubleday is preparing for blockbusters by Pat Conroy, Jon Krakauer, and of course, Dan Brown--whose Lost Symbol will be a marathon of a publishing job by itself, but one that promises to pay the division’s rent for years and bring stability to the entire Random House castle.

Such foolproof commercial juggarnauts help publishers and booksellers sleep at night, but the literary-minded among them can cheer too-- holy autumn! What a bunch of novels!

Thomas Pynchon has a new book coming on August 4, as does Richard Russo. Random House is publishing a novel by E. L. Doctorow on September 1st. A week after that, Knopf brings out Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, Nan Talese follows with Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux comes in a little later with Richard Powers’ Generosity: An Enhancement. In October there will be memoirs from Edmund White and Michael Chabon, and new novels from Jonathan Lethem, John Irving, A. S. Byatt, and Dave Eggers. November (think: holiday gifts) will see the publication of new works from Philip Roth, Barbara Kingsolver, and even Vladimir Nabokov. 

Such moments of confluence are rare. Depending on your metric, truly memorable ones tend to come around once every decade or so.

The start of 1985 saw Don Delillo’s White Noise and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian published in the space of a few weeks. The next time it happened was 1997, when Delillo’s Underworld, Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Haruki Marukami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Roth’s American Pastoral were published within months of each other. The last instance any of the people interviewed for this article brought up was the fall of 2006, which saw the publication of Eggers’ What is the What, Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land, Powers’ The Echo Maker, Atwood’s Moral Disorder, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, and Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.

Such windfalls stick in one’s memory, and having lived through one, you look forward to the next. 

“It was exciting,” said Granta editor John Freeman of fall 2006, who until recently was a full-time freelance book critic. “It’s sort of like Christmas come early. Suddenly there was a period like: big novel, big novel, big novel. I had this slightly neurotic sense like, surely all these books can’t be this good-- but they were! Which was quite nice, because normally you get one good one, and then, you know, some other books.”  

Even in historical context, the fall of 2009 strikes some as extraordinary.

“I have never seen another year like this,” said Sarah McNally, the owner of the popular Soho bookstore McNally Jackson. “I can hardly bear to think about fall’s books, it’s like looking bare-eyed into the sun.”

“I can’t really think of any time since I’ve been in the business, when I had a sense of the degree of anticipation for upcoming books, that would equal this fall,” said the Gernert Co. literary agent Chris Parris-Lamb.

With optimism, however, comes worry—particularly because shoving every major release into the same three months could very well result in a traffic jam that will benefit no one.  

“Given that the odds of all the books living up to the author’s and publisher’s expectations are quite slim, it’s a little intimidating,” said Martha Levin, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s Free Press imprint. “There will be books that get buried in the crush and will not sell as well as did the author’s previous book. It’s inevitable. As a publisher, you stick with the attitude that your books will prevail—until proven to the contrary.”

“But yes,” she added. “It is exciting. Just kind of scary too.”

Predictably, there are some who say this fall is nothing special-- that book publishing whips itself into a frenzy every year around this time. 

“The notion that a killer line-up of books is headed to the stores is a fantasy that big corporate publishers entertain every year starting in spring,” said one editor at a major house. “After they’ve dug out from the post-Christmas returns and begun to face the fact that their spring titles aren’t working.”

“We’ve got a lot of ground to make up,” he said. “And if we can’t do it with books like this, that’s a bad thing.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

—Additional reporting by Eliza Shapiro and Molly Fischer

As former New York Sun literary editor Tom Meaney explained it to us last year, “If you’re reading a galley on the subway, and someone comes to talk to you, you’re going to share a lot of things in common with them. You can have the right jeans or the right purse or whatever … but if you’re reading How Fiction Works in March, you know, three months before the book comes out, and you get the one girl who is interested in James Wood, well …”

Well, indeed! How Fiction Works was without a doubt one of last year’s most sought-after status galleys. Others included Roberto Bolano’s 2666 and Philip Roth’s Indignation. 

Getting on the subway yesterday and spotting someone with a Penguin Group totebag, we wondered: what are this summer’s status galleys? Are there any, or is everyone just anonymously reading Kindles now, as suggested by James Wolcott in this month’s Vanity Fair? 

We made some calls this morning and turns out there are a bunch! 

Joshua Ferris’s January 2010 novel The Unnamed, of which Reagan Arthur Books handed out more than a thousand copies during Book Expo in May, is among them, as is Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, which comes out in September. 

Consensus seems to be that the ultimate status galley this season has been Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, but actually it’s coming out in three weeks, and according to Tracy Locke, the publicist at Penguin Press, finished books are already being sent out relatively widely. But for a while there, only a very few people could claim to possess the ARC: per Ms. Locke, “They were ... on a very, very, very limited galley distribution. Basically what I did was I looked at what people’s deadlines were, so I went to all the monthlies first, and I sent them out as late as possible. It certainly would qualify as a status galley—we did our best to keep it under wraps.”

Lorin Stein, the editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, said that his author Sam Lipsyte’s follow-up to Home Land has been getting a lot of interest. “People really keep calling me to ask when we'll be able to show them Lipsyte,” Mr. Stein said in an email. “I've never had to answer that question so many times. The answer is: galleys by August 5. (And it's really great-looking.)”

Other books people mentioned include Richard Powers’ September novel Generosity: An Enhancement, Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City and Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs, both of which come out in October, and Mary Karr’s November memoir Lit. Sloane Crosley, the publicist at Vintage, suggested Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, which comes out next week but which was never distributed in galley, and the Otto Penzler–edited doorstop volume The Vampire Archives, which Vintage will publish in October and at this early stage is only in the hands of 200 people. 

Plus, Philip Roth once again has a new book coming out, this one called The Humbling and scheduled for publication in November. According to the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publicity department, there are 300 copies of that one floating around among critics and editors (500 if you include the ones sent to booksellers) but it’s already stirring buzz on the Twittersphere. Early last month blogger—and occasional book critic for The Observer!—Molly Young tweeted that she was about to go “wait near the mailbox till my galley of Philip Roth's upcoming THE HUMBLING arrives.” 

We caught up with Ms. Young over email this morning and asked her whether it had ever come. It had! Would she describe it?

“The cover is a grayish-pebble color and the book is very, very slim,” Ms. Young reported. “Almost pamphlet-sized. With big type. The cover looks like a typical Glaser cover, unobtrusive but immediately recognizable.” 

How did she happen to be among the lucky few to receive the book?  

“A kind editor sent me the book as a favor,” she said. “He was aware that I like Roth a lot—especially short Roth novels with lots of sex in them—and agreed to let me have a peek. The provision was that I not review or quote from the book, since there were future changes to be (possibly) made.”

She said she hadn’t spent any time reading The Humbling in public, and so could not say whether it worked the way a status galley is expected to. 

“[I] read it strictly in private, mostly because the content was racy enough to make me squirm,” Ms. Young said. “It's a very titillating book and I like to maintain a noble bearing in public, so this was not the reading material to support that goal."  She added: "Plus, if I saw someone reading a covetable ARC in public I'd interpret it as a weird passive mating call. I guess it's no worse than wearing an obscure band T-shirt—you're advertising your taste in hopes of attracting the select few who value that same object. But romances predicated on taste are sort of doomed, no? It's a flimsy pretext."

Whether or not the policy extends to books written by authors who already publish with HMH— or whether they're all going to have to find new publishers once they finish the books they've already been paid for—is unclear.

Reached for comment, Mr. Blumenfeld said he wants to stress that HMH will continue acquiring "some" manuscripts, but that projects will be subject to more scrutiny than before. "We still have an acquisitions committee," he said. "They're still considering manuscripts." Mr. Blumenfeld nevertheless referred to the new policy as a "freeze."

He said that "anything that's already in the pipeline that's already been contracted for or paid for will be published," he said. Asked whether writers like Philip Roth, who go under contract for one book at a time, will continue being published by HMH, Mr. Blumenfeld said he would check.

Before Media Mob managed to reach Mr. Blumenfeld, a receptionist at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's Boston office said a power outage that happened earlier today had sent most employees home. "There's no one in the building who can help you," the receptionist said.