Herald Diary: Time travel to the fore in Scottish politics heraldscotland.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from heraldscotland.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Mark Athitakis
Special to USA TODAY
When Philip Roth began his literary career in the 1950s, he started at the University of Chicago, where he said his ambitions were simple: “bibliography by day, women by night.” That’s something of a blunt organizing principle for Blake Bailey’s hotly anticipated biography, Philip Roth (Norton, 912 pp., ★★★ out of four). It’s a well-researched and engrossing book, but at times a frustratingly narrow one, despite its heft.
The arc of Roth’s life is American literary folklore now. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he scandalized the Jewish-American community he grew up in with his 1959 story collection “Goodbye, Columbus.” With his sexually irreverent 1969 novel “Portnoy’s Complaint,” he scandalized everybody else.
Philip Roth: The Biography, by Blake Bailey. W. W. Norton. 912 pages. $40.
I ’ve never understood what others make out of non-fiction. Me, I used to make fiction out of it, but that was a while ago and I’m talking about regular people. I’m talking about you people, who apparently even now keep buying and library-borrowing, perhaps even reading, masses of these vast, fact-teeming books whose genre swears to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. What exactly do you want from them? I can’t imagine you read history for the same reason I did, to cherry-pick period details to use in novels. And what about biographies? Do you read them out of curiosity, envy, jealousy? Do you read them only for comparison? That’s what I did, back when I was alive: I read other lives
Sunderland parents honour seven-month-old daughter who died after battling rare heart defect
Hope Jones never got to see the outside of hospital and only met her older sisters twice
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Thank you for subscribingWe have more newslettersShow meSee ourprivacy notice The parents of a baby girl who died of a rare heart defect are preparing to honour her memory.
Idées cadeaux : 10 livres de poche pour Noël lesinrocks.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lesinrocks.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.