Ted Solotaroff News Today

Joan Didion has had a startlingly active afterlife. A star-studded memorial, a pricey estate sale, an underselling Upper East Side co-op: In the almost two years since her death at age 87, much has been said about the queen of New Journalism—good, bad, and unctuous. The lifestyle coverage can be both a distraction and a deflection from the serious substance of Didion’s reporting on topics from the Central Park Five to wartime atrocities in El Salvador. More than the sunglasses or a...

Influential author, recipient of the Israel Prize and dozens of other awards was also known as a sharp-tongued polemicist and staunch Zionist

Correspondence found in archives shows how ‘pushy’ novelist used ‘collusion, networking and back-scratching’ to win literary awards

Roth and his Chicago connections run deep, as described in "Philip Roth: The Biography" by Blake Bailey.