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Reading Myself and Others

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Not only is Philip Roth perhaps America's greatest living novelist, he is one of the nation's very best literary critics as well. This book is a compilation of essays and interviews he published before 1974. Included is his piercing analyses of the accusations of anti-Semitism made against him as well as "Writing American Fiction", the classic essay where he declares that the novelist's imagination can't possibly keep up with the extravagance of American reality. Also included is the short story/essay "Looking at Kafka" which may be the best thing ever written about that quintessential modernist author. Roth has written enough criticism in the years since this book was published to assemble a whole new volume: please, we badly need an update!

Interviews, articles , essays. An essay on Kafka which turns into a moving fiction on what would have happened to Kafka had he come as a war refugee to Roth's New Jersey. Writing about the East-European authors he has championed, about the claim of the Jewish community that his writing has not served it very well, about the novel, and the American reality which in its extravagance seems to produce more than any fiction can do, an essay on The Newark Public Library one on Cambodia, on 'TheBaseball Years' on his protege Alan Lelchuk, reflections on his own books, Portnoy, the Breast, the Great American novel, Life as a Man.
A rich collection by the funniest and certainly one of the best American writers of the last half- century.