Philip Roth
Story Stream
The Psychology of 'Portnoy' October 22, 2025
Already in 1967, the same year When She Was Good came out, the first samples of Portnoy’s Complaint were issued in wide-circulation magazines like Esquire and Sport, as well as the highbrow Partisan Review. Indeed, it was there, in that mainstay of t...
The Literary Ruins of #MeToo April 24, 2025
In 2017, during the first wave of #MeToo, I was reluctantly noncompliant. On several occasions, I was approached by journalists to participate in stories about accused men in media, and declined to do so. As a lifelong feminist, I liked the idea of p...
The Ghostwriter April 11, 2025
“Where’s the Semen?” Such was the provocative question headline posed by Jesse Tisch in this magazine’s review of the then-forthcoming Philip Roth: The Biography. The biographer in question was Blake Bailey, who had honed his writer-writing-about-wri...
Rereading Philip Roth Today July 25, 2024
Philip Roth had little patience with his Jewish critics. When his short stories were collected in Goodbye Columbus (1959), Roth claims that he was attacked from all sides as a “dangerous, dishonest, and irresponsible” person, largely on the basis of ...
