In Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel _American Pastoral_, his protagonist, a Jew named Seymour Levov who goes by the nickname “the Swede,” sees his life turned upside down when his daughter turns terrorist and blows up a post office. … Read More
He’s old, Stieglitz is, when I’m looking at this photograph in my dining room. It’s one hundred and forty-three years since he was born, but he’s still hunched over his desk in his little, crowded gallery like he was when … Read More
Jonathan Safran Foer has had a trajectory in the publishing world that is close to ideal. In 2002, at the age of 25, he published _Everything is Illuminated_, a novel that developed out of his senior thesis at Princeton where … Read More
There was a bit of marinara sauce spilled out on the counter in a cluster of islands. Four blotches of red, decreasing in size and arcing away from the stovetop like Hawaii. The sauce was cold and was slowly drying … Read More
Roman Polanski has lived one of the most fascinating lives of the last century, though it would be hard to call it “good.” Such a title ought to be reserved for more pleasant, straightforward existences that perhaps begin modestly and … Read More
Sarah Palin is the politician Jonathan Swift would have imagined for this century if he were living in it. An attractive woman with some sort of strictly defined set of morals, she has exploded onto the scene because she is … Read More
One of my favorite pieces of writing that I’ve ever read is “Pafko at the Wall,” a novella by Don DeLillo that also serves as the opening to his massive novel _Underworld_. The story is about “The Shot Heard ‘round … Read More
There are few greater honors for the writer than to meet the King of Sweden. This, of course, comes after one wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, joining the ranks of Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Bellow and Neruda. The King of … Read More
Recently I went to a reading by the Russian-American writer Gary Shteyngart at Labyrinth. He was reading from his new novel Super Sad True Love Story, a widely praised satirical novel about the very near future. Shteyngart is a young … Read More