11 Feb
2014 January-February, Arts & Culture, Jewish World

Book Review // Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

Life Beyond Portnoy By Alan Stone Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Claudia Roth Pierpont Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013, pp. 353, $27.00   Philip Roth’s pen has finally run dry, and he has announced his retirement. As if to commemorate that event, Claudia Roth Pierpont—no relation, but a good friend and a superb writer—has produced this brilliant literary biography, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books. Her project, which began as an essay for The New Yorker, where she’s a staff writer, grew into this extraordinary, encompassing account as the dialogue between the two writers deepened into friendship and mutual admiration. Roth, as anyone who has met him can tell you, is an amazingly charming man. One can sense this on every page of Roth Unbound. That said, Pierpont’s literary judgments are exacting: One comes away from her book with the...

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20 May
2013 May-June, Arts & Culture

Book Review | Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt

Saul Friedländer Yale University Press 2013, $25.00, pp. 200 “Dearest Max, my last request: everything I leave behind me…in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, to be burned unread…Yours, Franz Kafka” Dearest Max was Max Brod, who famously decided not to obey the last wish of his best friend, who died in 1924 of tuberculosis one month short of his 41st birthday. Brod, an ambitious and prolific writer himself, would have long since been forgotten had it not been for his role as the custodian, editor and publisher of Kafka’s writings. Brod escaped the Nazis on the last train out of Prague, carrying two suitcases filled with the material he was supposed to burn.The works he saved and edited made Kafka the most important literary figure of the middle of...

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