Tuesday, April 28, 2009, 7pm, Music Building, $20

A 50th Anniversary Celebration
of the Work of Philip Roth
with
P h i l i p   R o t h
N o r m a n   M a n e a
G r e i l   M a r c u s
J o y c e   C a r o l   O a t e s   &
N o r m a n   R u s h

Philip Roth published his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, fifty years ago in 1959. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the National Medal of Arts, Mr. Roth is the author of many novels, including Letting Go, Portnoy’s Complaint, My Life as a Man, The Professor of Desire, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, Sabbath’s Theater, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain, Exit Ghost, and, most recently, Indignation. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writing in the New York Observer, has said of the work of Mr. Roth that it is “remarkable…remarkable in its stringent observation of American life, remarkable in its poignant sense of the contradictions and pathos of human existence, remarkable in its style and in its wisdom.” Milan Kundera, writing in Le Monde, has said: “Philip Roth is the great historian of modern eroticism…Roth speaks of sexuality that questions itself; it is still hedonism, but it is problematic, wounded, ironic hedonism. His is the uncommon union of confession and irony. Infinitely vulnerable in his sincerity and infinitely elusive in his irony.” Cynthia Ozick, writing in Contemporary Literature, has described the work of Mr. Roth as “totally amazing, in language, intellect, plotting, thesis, analysis, reach, daring…A stupendous thing, before which much current fiction will seem diminished, shrunken. He’s now the boldest American writer alive.”


Norman Manea is widely regarded as one of Eastern Europe’s greatest living writers. He is the National Jewish Book Award-winning author of several works of fiction that have been translated into English, including October, Eight O’Clock, Compulsory Happiness, and The Black Envelope, as well as the collection of essays On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist, and the memoir The Hooligan’s Return. The Wall Street Journal has said: “Approaching his themes from oblique and unexpectedly illuminating angles, Manea poignantly conveys the slow shock of being awakened from the Nazi terror only to find yourself still trapped in the bad dream of Communism.” Cynthia Ozick has said: “[Manea’s work] is less about the daily despotism it defies than it is about a heroic psyche dedicated to internal freedom.” Heinrich Boll has said: “Of all contemporary writers Norman Manea is the one who most deserves being known around the world.”


Greil Marcus is the author of The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice, as well as the co-editor (with Sean Wilentz) of The Rose & the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad, and co-editor (with Werner Sollors) of A New Literary History of America, which is forthcoming in the fall of 2009. Luc Sante, writing in New York Magazine, has said: “[Marcus’s] work is very likely the most imaginative criticism being done, but it’s more than that: It’s a light in dark times.” San Francisco Magazine has said: “The thrill of reading Marcus at his best comes from the freewheeling thought, the sparks he sets off by having two disparate historical figures shake hands…Greil Marcus remains a perceptive cultural diviner and a true believer in the power of art to tell us stories about ourselves.” The Times Literary Supplement has said of the work of Mr. Marcus: “His readings of American Pastoral, The Human Stain, and I Married a Communist are absorbing. And when he gets to The Plot Against America, he outdoes himself…[Marcus is] probably the most astute critic of American popular culture since Edmund Wilson.”


Joyce Carol Oates is the National Book Award-winning author of many novels, including them, Wonderland, We Are the Mulvaneys, Black Water, What I Lived For, Blonde, and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. The Detroit Free Press has said of Ms. Oates’s work: “…people will be reading [it] a century from now, the way we read Dickens and Henry James, not only for its perfect evocation of time and place, but for its timeless grace and clarity.” The New Yorker has described the work of Ms. Oates as “a storm of experience whose reality we cannot doubt, a fusion of fact and feeling, vision and circumstance, which holds together, and hold us to it through our terror and dismay.” The Washington Post Book World has described Ms. Oates as “one of America’s finest realistic novelists.”


Norman Rush is the National Book Award-winning author of the collection of stories Whites, and the novels Mating and Mortals. The St. Petersburg Times has said: “Rush…uncovers with grace, good humor and intelligence the sinuous complexities of the white man’s experience of Africa…[He gives us] the sense of looking into the lives of individuals at precisely those moments where they reveal the most about themselves and about the culture that shaped them.” The New York Review of Books has described the work of Mr. Rush as “the best rendering of erotic politics…since D. H. Lawrence.” John Leonard, writing in The New York Times Book Review, has said: “Norman Rush has now produced three books so full of brainwork, contour, sinew and laser light that we don’t want to leave home without him: we would never notice or feel as much.”

photo of Philip Roth: Nancy Crampton; photo of Norman Manea: Nancy Crampton; photo of Greil Marcus: Thierry Arditti, Paris; photo of Norman Rush: Jerry Bauer