Coetzee on Roth
The mood of Philip Roth’s four most recent novels “is subdued, regret-filled, melancholy: they are composed, as it were, in a minor key,” says J.M. Coetzee.
The mood of Philip Roth’s four most recent novels “is subdued, regret-filled, melancholy: they are composed, as it were, in a minor key,” says J.M. Coetzee.
“Victor Hugo would write naked and tell his valet to hide his clothes so that he’d be unable to go outside when he was supposed to be writing.” (See also.)
My last sight of you alive: Ted Hughes’ long-lost poem “Last Letter,” inspired by the suicide of his wife, Sylvia Plath, will be published Thursday in The New Statesman. (See also.)
Some writers shame and immobilize me with their brilliance, while others, like Twain, de Vries and Spark,* dwarf my own efforts but inspire me to keep on. It’s hard to pinpoint what separates the two groups; if pressed I’d say it’s an affinity of perspective — a morbid fixation on the absurdities of human existence — combined with precision, bluntness, and . . .