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Tracing the full span of Philip Roth’s career—from the early controversies surrounding the stories in Goodbye, Columbus to his recent assessments of his work and corrections of the record—Why Write? shows at every turn the vigor, acuity, and persuasive power of Roth’s brilliant nonfiction. As a retrospective summation of his essays and interviews, it is essential reading in tandem with Roth’s novels, both for the discussions of his own books and as a record of his profound engagement with other writers: Kafka, Bellow, Malamud, and the leading figures of Cold War–era Czechoslovakia... more Tracing the full span of Philip Roth’s career—from the early controversies surrounding the stories in Goodbye, Columbus to his recent assessments of his work and corrections of the record—Why Write? shows at every turn the vigor, acuity, and persuasive power of Roth’s brilliant nonfiction. As a retrospective summation of his essays and interviews, it is essential reading in tandem with Roth’s novels, both for the discussions of his own books and as a record of his profound engagement with other writers: Kafka, Bellow, Malamud, and the leading figures of Cold War–era Czechoslovakia among them.
Divided into three sections, Why Write? begins with Roth’s selection of the indispensable core of Reading Myself and Others, first published in 1975 and expanded for a second edition ten years later. It opens with the remarkable hybrid story-essay, “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka,” a critical evaluation that yields to a fictional imagination of Kafka as young Roth’s Hebrew School teacher in 1940s Newark, the first of the provocative forays into speculative alternative realities that would take shape in novels like The Ghost Writer and The Plot Against America. In the essays and interviews given in the wake of the explosive release of Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth clarifies how he sought to “raise obscenity to the level of a subject,” provides sharp-edged insights into an America wracked by political turmoil and sexual revolution, and defends the imaginative freedom of writers and readers alike.
The volume’s second section presents in its entirety the 2001 book Shop Talk, a series of conversations with writers such as Aharon Appelfeld, Primo Levi, and Edna O’Brien, as well as essays on Malamud, Bellow, and the artist Philip Guston. The collection highlights Roth’s skill as an astute literary interlocutor, engaged with writers whose traditions, assumptions, and experience can differ markedly from those of the American world of his own fiction.
The concluding section, “Explanations,” comprises fourteen later pieces collected here for the first time, six of them never before published. Among the essays gathered are “My Uchronia,” an account of the genesis of The Plot Against America, a novel grounded in the insight that “all the assurances are provisional, even here in a two-hundred-year-old democracy”; “Errata,” the unabridged version of the “Open Letter to Wikipedia” published on The New Yorker’s website in 2012 to counter the online encyclopedia’s egregious errors about his life and work; “Forty-Five Years On,” Roth’s absolute last word on Portnoy; and “The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction,” a speech delivered on the occasion of his eightieth birthday that evokes the Newark of Roth’s childhood and examines the “refractory way of living” of Sabbath’s Theater’s Mickey Sabbath. Also included are two lengthy interviews given after Roth’s retirement, which take stock of a lifetime of work: “Morning after morning for fifty years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation.” less 
Rob RiemenThe responsibility of the writer is to constantly ask—through the world of the imagination, through the novel—‘What is it to be human? What is it to be humane? (Source)
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The National Book Award-winning author of Year of the Monkey, Just Kids, and M Train offers a rare, intimate account of her own creative process.
A work of creative brilliance may seem like magic—its source a mystery, its impact unexpectedly stirring. How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audience never met? In this groundbreaking book, one of our culture’s beloved artists offers a detailed account of her own creative process, inspirations, and unexpected connections.
Patti Smith first presents an... more The National Book Award-winning author of Year of the Monkey, Just Kids, and M Train offers a rare, intimate account of her own creative process.
A work of creative brilliance may seem like magic—its source a mystery, its impact unexpectedly stirring. How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audience never met? In this groundbreaking book, one of our culture’s beloved artists offers a detailed account of her own creative process, inspirations, and unexpected connections.
Patti Smith first presents an original and beautifully crafted tale of obsession—a young skater who lives for her art, a possessive collector who ruthlessly seeks his prize, a relationship forged of need both craven and exalted. She then takes us on a second journey, exploring the sources of her story. We travel through the South of France to Camus’s house, and visit the garden of the great publisher Gallimard where the ghosts of Mishima, Nabokov, and Genet mingle. Smith tracks down Simone Weil’s grave in a lonely cemetery, hours from London, and winds through the nameless Paris streets of Patrick Modiano’s novels. Whether writing in a café or a train, Smith generously opens her notebooks and lets us glimpse the alchemy of her art and craft in this arresting and original book on writing.
The Why I Write series is based on the Windham-Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University. less Rob RiemenShe’s a phenomenal writer and she’s one of the most erudite people I’ve ever met. (Source)
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Bernard-Henri Lévy, Steven B. Kennedy | 3.12
From world-renowned public intellectual Bernard-Henri L'vy comes an incisive and provocative look at the heart of Judaism.
"A smart, revealing, and essential book for our times."--The Washington Post
For more than four decades, Bernard-Henri L'vy has been a singular figure on the world stage--one of the great moral voices of our time. Now Europe's foremost philosopher and activist confronts his spiritual roots and the religion that has always inspired and shaped him--but that he has never fully reckoned with.
The Genius of Judaism... more From world-renowned public intellectual Bernard-Henri L'vy comes an incisive and provocative look at the heart of Judaism.
"A smart, revealing, and essential book for our times."--The Washington Post
For more than four decades, Bernard-Henri L'vy has been a singular figure on the world stage--one of the great moral voices of our time. Now Europe's foremost philosopher and activist confronts his spiritual roots and the religion that has always inspired and shaped him--but that he has never fully reckoned with.
The Genius of Judaism is a breathtaking new vision and understanding of what it means to be a Jew, a vision quite different from the one we're used to. It is rooted in the Talmudic traditions of argument and conflict, rather than biblical commandments, borne out in struggle and study, not in blind observance. At the very heart of the matter is an obligation to the other, to the dispossessed, and to the forgotten, an obligation that, as L'vy vividly recounts, he has sought to embody over decades of championing "lost causes," from Bosnia to Africa's forgotten wars, from Libya to the Kurdish Peshmerga's desperate fight against the Islamic State, a battle raging as we speak. L'vy offers a fresh, surprising critique of a new and stealthy form of anti-Semitism on the rise as well as a provocative defense of Israel from the left. He reveals the overlooked Jewish roots of Western democratic ideals and confronts the current Islamist threat while intellectually dismantling it. Jews are not a "chosen people," L'vy explains, but a "treasure" whose spirit must continue to inform moral thinking and courage today.
L'vy's most passionate book, and in many ways his most personal, The Genius of Judaism is a great, profound, and hypnotic intellectual reckoning--indeed a call to arms--by one of the keenest and most insightful writers in the world.
Praise for The Genius of Judaism
"In The Genius of Judaism, L'vy elaborates on his credo by rebutting the pernicious and false logic behind current anti-Semitism and defends Israel as the world's most successful multi-ethnic democracy created from scratch. L'vy also makes the case for France's Jews being integral to the establishment of the French nation, the French language, and French literature. And last, but certainly not least, he presents a striking interpretation of the Book of Jonah. . . . A tour de force."--Forbes
"Ardent . . . L'vy's message is essentially uplifting: that the brilliant scholars of Judaism, the authors of the Talmud, provide elucidation into 'the great questions that have stirred humanity since the dawn of time.' . . . A philosophical celebration of Judaism."--Kirkus Reviews
"L'vy (Left in Dark Times), a prominent French journalist and politically engaged philosopher, turns his observations inward here, pondering the teachings of Judaism and the role they have played in contemporary European history as well as in his own life and intellectual inquiry. . . . [L'vy's] musings on the meaning of the story of Jonah and the relevance of symbolic Ninevahs in our time are both original and poetic. . . . A welcome addition to his oeuvre."--Publishers Weekly less See more recommendations for this book...
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Conversations
George Steiner, Laure Adler, Teresa Lavender Fagan | 4.35
George Steiner is one of the preeminent intellectuals of our time. The Washington Post has declared that no one else “writing on literature can match him as polymath and polyglot, and few can equal the verve and eloquence of his writing,” while the New York Times says of his works that “the erudition is almost as extraordinary as the prose: dense, knowing, allusive.” Reading in many languages, celebrating the survival of high culture in the face of modern barbarisms, Steiner probes the ethics of language and literature with unparalleled grace and authority. A Long... more George Steiner is one of the preeminent intellectuals of our time. The Washington Post has declared that no one else “writing on literature can match him as polymath and polyglot, and few can equal the verve and eloquence of his writing,” while the New York Times says of his works that “the erudition is almost as extraordinary as the prose: dense, knowing, allusive.” Reading in many languages, celebrating the survival of high culture in the face of modern barbarisms, Steiner probes the ethics of language and literature with unparalleled grace and authority. A Long Saturday offers intimate insight into the questions that have absorbed him throughout his career.
In a stimulating series of conversations, Steiner and journalist Laure Adler discuss a range of topics, including Steiner’s boyhood in Vienna and Paris, his education at the University of Chicago and Harvard, and his early years in academia. Books are a touchstone throughout, but Steiner and Adler’s conversations also range over music, chess, psychoanalysis, the place of Israel in Jewish life, and beyond. Blending thoughts on subjects of broad interest in the humanities—the issue of honoring Richard Wagner and Martin Heidegger in spite of their politics, or Virginia Woolf’s awareness of the novel as a multivocal form, for example—with personal reflections on life and family, Steiner demonstrates why he is considered one of today’s greatest minds. Revealing and exhilarating, A Long Saturday invites readers to pull up a chair and listen in on a conversation with a master. less Rob RiemenA Long Saturday is a beautiful, intellectual testament of a great European humanist. It’s a reminder what civilization is all about, why book culture is important and what the world of Judaism has to offer to the world. (Source)
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Nuccio Ordine, Alastair McEwen, Abraham Flexner | 3.49
"A little masterpiece of originality and clarity."—George Steiner
"A beautiful, correct, and necessary book . . . a significant act of cultural resistance." —Leon Wieseltier
"A necessary book."—Roberto Saviano
"A wonderful little book that will delight you."—François Busnel
International Best Seller / Now in English for the First Time
In this thought-provoking and extremely timely work, Nuccio Ordine convincingly argues for the utility of useless knowledge and against the contemporary fixation on utilitarianism—for the fundamental... more "A little masterpiece of originality and clarity."—George Steiner
"A beautiful, correct, and necessary book . . . a significant act of cultural resistance." —Leon Wieseltier
"A necessary book."—Roberto Saviano
"A wonderful little book that will delight you."—François Busnel
International Best Seller / Now in English for the First Time
In this thought-provoking and extremely timely work, Nuccio Ordine convincingly argues for the utility of useless knowledge and against the contemporary fixation on utilitarianism—for the fundamental importance of the liberal arts and against the damage caused by their neglect. Inspired by the reflections of great philosophers and writers (e.g., Plato, Dante, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Borges, and Calvino), Ordine reveals how the obsession for material goods and the cult of utility ultimately wither the spirit, jeopardizing not only schools and universities, art, and creativity, but also our most fundamental values—human dignity, love, and truth.
Nuccio Ordine is a professor of Italian Literature at the University of Calabria and one of the world’s leading experts on the Italian Renaissance and the philosopher Giordano Bruno. He has taught at Yale, New York University, the Sorbonne, the Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris, and the Warburg Institute London, among others. Professor Ordine has been named a Knight of the French Legion of Honour, a Knight Commander of the Republic of Italy, and given an honorary membership in the Russian Academy of Sciences. His books have been translated into twenty languages.
Abraham Flexner (1866–1959) was an educator and reformer whose work helped transform higher education throughout North America. He was the founding Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, one of the world’s leading centers for intellectual inquiry and research.
less Rob RiemenNuccio’s wonderful, small book is a compilation of the many things from antiquity to nowadays, making this call, not to make a mistake. (Source)
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