Last weekend The Guardian published an interview with Philip Roth in which he suggested that Marcus Messner, the narrator from his new novel, Indignation, is not dead while he’s telling his story—as pretty much every critic thought—but rather hallucinating as a result of a morphine high. In a radio interview set to air tomorrow Read More
A short item on Portfolio.com by Lauren Lipton argues that super-producer Scott Rudin was unwise to acquire the rights to Philip Roth’s brand new novel Indignation "given Roth’s Hollywood track record."
Supporting evidence: "Of his many tomes, only a few have made it to the big screen to date."
Few here Read More
Indignation
By Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin, 233 pages, $26
First, an apology: Like many of his fans, I expect a masterpiece every time a new Philip Roth novel is announced, and when it falls short, I carp and quibble and point invidiously to past Roth triumphs. Sorry.
Indignation is flawed, but I promise to ignore Read More
Add another trend piece to the ever-growing ‘Internet Porn Addiction Ruins Relationships’ canon. This month, Details‘ Em & Lo offer Jerking Off Is the New Infidelity (subhed: "Is your secret habit causing your marriage to slip through your fingers?"), in which we learn that, "While some guys store everyday images and encounters to Read More
Leon Neyfakh tracks the latest bookish fad: Picking up girls (or boys) using a galley: "This is what happens when someone reads a galley (a.k.a. ARC, or advance reading copy) in public: publishing people take notice and begin to wonder about certain things. There’s the galley’s provenance, of course. But what about its owner? Read More
There was a reading last Tuesday night at a performance space in Chelsea attended by a lot of young publishing types. Some of them had jobs at places like Farrar, Straus & Giroux, The New York Review of Books and the Wylie Agency; some worked at Harper’s magazine and others were in creative writing programs. Read More
If you remember this year’s White House Correspondent’s Dinner, you weren’t there. Felix Gillette, John Koblin, and Choire Sicha flood the zone in D.C..
Janet Silver is moving from Houghton Mifflin to Nan Talese’s imprint at Doubleday. Leon Neyfakh checks in with with Ms. Talese who says, "I called Janet and she sent Read More
On May 1, former Houghton Mifflin publisher Janet Silver starts her new job as an editor at large at Nan Talese’s boutique literary imprint at Doubleday.
Back in January, Ms. Silver and several other editors at Houghton Mifflin were made redundant as part of the company’s merger with Harcourt.
But Ms. Silver Read More
The music of Tchaikovsky loomed large in New York’s orchestral life over the past several weeks, but it was not always well served. At Carnegie Hall, Franz Welser-Möst conducted the Cleveland Orchestra in a freeze-dried performance of the searing Sixth Symphony; farther uptown, Lorin Maazel and the brass section of the New York Philharmonic blasted Read More
