More in ‘Saul Bellow’

If the best fiction, as Norman Mailer once wrote, attempts to “clarify a nation’s vision of itself,” fiction published in Commentary magazine acted not only as a record of the magazine’s evolution, but also as a midrash—an exegetical narrative—on the American Jewish experience itself. Before World War II, although the Jew-as-entertainer was a familiar figure ...

This week, the New Yorker treats us to a selection of colorful letters from Saul Bellow to his fellow writers, including Bernard Malamud, Alfred Kazin, and John Cheever. A sample of choice moments:
To William Faulkner, responding to a defense of Ezra Pound: “What staggers me is that you and Mr. Steinbeck, who have dealt for ...

Historically speaking, America and the King James Bible are almost twins. The first English colony in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607; four years later, the Church of England completed its translation of the Authorized Version of the Bible, which, like the colony, bore the name of the reigning monarch. And it ...

Adam Thirlwell, who was born in London in 1978, is one of the most lavishly praised British writers to emerge in the last decade. His first novel, Politics, was published in 2003 to wide acclaim, and he followed it with an idiosyncratic work of criticism, The Delighted States. Even if you didn’t know about Thirlwell’s ...

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 ...