There's a good report in the New York Times of a two-day celebration of the work of Philip Roth. It included:
Quite right too - a literary giant and no mistake. Both there and here, you can see a picture of Roth and his adoring mom on the beach at Belmar in 1935. I also like this:... papers on narrativity, performativity and counterfactuality in Roth; on the connections between Roth and Austen, Roth and Joyce, Roth and Yeats, Roth and Synge; on Roth in Romania and Roth in Russia.
[Roth] added a defense of the writer's habit of rummaging around in memory for just such details. "This passion for specificity, for the hypnotic materiality of the world one is in," he said, "is all but at the heart of the task to which every American novelist has been enjoined since Herman Melville and his whale and Mark Twain and his river: to discover the most arresting, evocative verbal depiction for every last American thing."
If we could only get him to keep writing.
