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Given the accusations of abuse made against Blake Bailey, Gene Lyons writes, he has no interesting “at all” in reading Bailey’s Philip Roth biography. As a rule, I read few biographies, and certainly not of authors, people whose most significant life events are spent alone. In my case, Churchill, Swift and Dostoyevsky are the exceptions that prove the rule: world historical figures who can’t be understood outside the context of their times. So I’d already decided not to bother with Blake Bailey’s ballyhooed new book, “Philip Roth: The Biography” — even though Roth was a fri...

May 6, 2021 Blake Bailey’s new book about Philip Roth was taken out of print by the publisher after Bailey was accused of rape and attempted rape and “grooming” his teenage students for sex with him when they reached 18. Nation columnist Also: Literature, art, and the idea of ‘freedom’ during the Cold War, from George Orwell to James Baldwin to The Family of Man: Louis Menand has been thinking about all of this. His new book is The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War. Menand teaches at Harvard and writes for The New Yorker.

Or are they? We’re seeing a worrisome trend in which publishers are pressured to either pull books from publication or cancel book contracts because of accusations made against the authors. And publishers are caving in. Historically, when books have been attacked, the assault has come from right-wing scolds. But this time the attacks are largely coming from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, launched by people who would never imagine themselves as threats to free speech. Their actions, however, are no less troubling than those that come from the extreme right. W.W. Norton rece...

The Atlantic There’s value in knowing what the subject wanted told about himself. 6:30 AM ET Adam Maida / The Atlantic Ten years ago, at Philip Roth’s urging, his agent, Andrew Wylie, informed the literary critic and academic Ira Nadel “that he didn’t have permission to quote from Roth’s work, nor would any of Roth’s friends and associates cooperate in any way” with Nadel’s planned biography. When Nadel’s Philip Roth: A Counterlife came out in March, it received very few and generally indifferent reviews. The Wylie item comes from the other new Roth biography, the one that

This book has been cancelled Blake Bailey’s new book on Philip Roth has been withdrawn by its US publisher after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct against the biographer. Should the work be judged by the standards of the life? One of the most striking elements of the allegations against the celebrated literary biographer Blake Bailey was the speed and fervency of his denial. Over the course of recent weeks, Bailey, 57, whose biography of Philip Roth was published last month, has been accused of multiple acts of grooming and sexual assault. The allegations encompass a 20-year perio...