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Philip Roth on 2005 Credit: AP The first major biographical work on Philip Roth portrayed one of America’s greatest novelists as a borderline-sociopathic philanderer. It was hardly an impartial book but it certainly had a claim to insider knowledge. The author was Roth’s estranged wife, the actress Claire Bloom. The publication of Bloom’s Leaving a Doll’s House in 1996 galvanised Roth into launching a search for an official biographer: somebody who would give readers the facts of Roth’s life from the horse’s mouth rather than that of his former stablemate.  As Roth later explaine...

Novelist Charles Yu brings his "Interior Chinatown" to the L.A. Times Book Club on May 27.

To me, the much-repeated claim that the task of keeping Carrie placated influences our Prime Minister's decisions seems unbelievable. Can this really be true? Is the most powerful man in the country, Boris, the original alpha male, so nervous about his fiancee throwing a wobbly that he makes not only domestic but professional choices based on swerving the pots and pans she might chuck his way? His appointment of Allegra Stratton as the face and voice of Downing Street communications was reported to come down to his fear that Carrie would be cross if she didn't win the gig. When the investigat...

Susan Matthews

April 30, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET Philip Roth in 2018, a few months before his death.Credit...Philip Montgomery for The New York Times By Ruth Franklin Ms, Franklin is the author of a biography of the writer Shirley Jackson. In “The Aspern Papers,” the Henry James novella of literary obsession, a biographer becomes fixated on a stash of secret letters belonging to an elderly woman who was once his subject’s girlfriend. Abandoning all his moral scruples, he persuades her to take him in as her tenant and pretends to court her niece. The book is said to be inspired in part by an anecdote about ...