"He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one..."
Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher,...

"The renowned biographer's definitive portrait of a literary titan. Appointed by Philip Roth and granted independence and complete access, Blake Bailey spent years poring over Roth's personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and engaging Roth himself in breathtakingly candid conversations. The result is an indelible portrait of an American master and of the postwar literary scene. Bailey shows how Roth emerged from a lower-middle-class...

"Since tales of his exploits began appearing in The New Yorker more than thirty years ago, Henry Bech, John Updike's playfully irreverent alter ego, has charmed readers with his aesthetic dithering and his seemingly inexhaustible libido. The Bech stories - here collected in one volume for the first time, and featuring a final, series-capping story, "His Oeuvre"--Cast an affectionate eye on the famously unproductive Jewish-American writer, offering...

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"When this second volume of The Life of Saul Bellow opens, Bellow, at forty-nine, is at the pinnacle of American letters--rich, famous, critically acclaimed. The expected trajectory is one of decline: volume 1, rise; volume 2, fall. Bellow never fell, producing some of his greatest fiction (Mr. Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift, all his best stories) and winning two more National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize. At eighty, he wrote...

"For fans of The Invisible Bridge and The History of Love, a lyrical and exquisitely moving novel about a writer who embarks on a transformative journey in Amsterdam, where he discovers the shocking truth about his mother's wartime experience-unearthing a remarkable story that becomes the subject of his magnum opus. At the behest of his agent, renowned author Yoel Blum reluctantly agrees to visit his birthplace of Amsterdam to meet with his Dutch...