Posts tagged as Philip Roth

The final story in Elisa Albert’s debut collection How This Night Is Different is in the form of a letter to Philip Roth from “Elisa Albert.” In it, the author—or her alter-ego, or whatever—offers to bear the aging, famously childless author a son or daughter. It’s a joke, and it isn’t. It’s hilarious either way. And for (h/t Julie Klausner) Jewish Girls who have considered suicide when Zuckerman Unbound was enuf, reading it produces the uncanny sensation of having had the top of one’s head unscrewed and one’s brain contents poured directly onto a page, which one is somehow then reading. I mean, who hasn’t thought of offering herself up as a gestational surrogate to Philip Roth? (Um.) READ MORE

Elements of Stale, with Luke Mazur: Leaving the Green Lane Country Club

Luke Mazur | January 13, 2010

Maybe some of that $15 million Columbia University just received for a center devoted to digital journalism can be used to figure out why there are, as of now, two Jersey Shore posts here on this website, over the course of just two days. The same grant can pay someone to parse how Avatar, Katie Roiphe's favorite authors and pop sociology intersect with any of this. Until then, let me do my part. READ MORE

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Roth's Bad Sex

Alex Balk | November 18, 2009

"This was not soft porn. This was no longer two unclothed women caressing and kissing on a bed. There was something primitive about it now, this woman-on-woman violence, as though in the room filled with shadows, Pegeen were a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal. It was as if she were wearing a mask on her genitals, a weird totem mask, that made her into what she was not and was not supposed to be. There was something dangerous about it. His heart thumped with excitement – the god Pan looking on from a distance with his spying, lascivious gaze." Philip Roth's The Humbling makes the shortlist for the Literary Review's annual Bad Sex award. A green dildo is also involved.