“Sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness are my closest friends,” Philip Roth once said. Over a career that spanned almost 50 years, he wrote 31 books, including an early effort mischievously titled The Great American Novel (1973). Howard Jacobson: Is American Pastoral Philip Roth at his best? But he also wrote five books about Philip Roth, who both was and was not a recognisable self-portrait. In Operation Shylock, a fictional real Philip Roth confronted a fictional counterfeit Philip Roth in a vertiginous game about the nature of identity.

Source: The Guardian May 26, 2018 09:00 UTC