all that you touch you changeall that you change changes you [ . . . ] During this “Dim Age” governments defined parts of the North American Southwest as zones…
Contemporaries Essays
The Double’s Allegiance: Philip Roth and the Question of Zion
Midway through Philip Roth’s brilliant and maddening 1993 novel Operation Shylock, Roth’s alter ego — who this time around is simply named Philip Roth — takes a road trip from…
Philip Roth and the Fantasies of Authorship
Being Zuckerman is one long performance and the very opposite of what is thought of as being oneself. -The Counterlife In an article in the New York Times published shortly…
Philip Roth’s Modest Phase
In the 1950s, when Philip Roth came of age and first began to publish, it was the fate of the writer to have to consider the fate of the individual,…
Rough: A Journey into the Drafts of Portnoy’s Complaint
A month ago, I was on the phone with a librarian in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, inquiring about the papers of Philip Roth. Would I need…
Introduction: Roth’s Yahrzeit
Philip Roth’s death, last May, at the age of 85, shouldn’t have come as a surprise — after all, he was very old! — but it did. His last novel,…
Horror and the Arts of Feminist Assembly
We live in an era of what Lauren Berlant has called “genre flail.” Amid the floods, famine, and fire of accelerating climate disaster, worsening refugee crises, unbounded global war, mass…