Philip Roth - Where to begin?

I'd read a Roth bio in a second. Also I never realized Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry is basically his version of Roth. One of his best, obviously.

The Ghost Writer.

Yeah, maybe.

Can't remember if the first thing I read from him was an excerpt from that in The New Yorker. Probably not but close.

the new bio is out in a month or so, tho prob there are review copies around or w/e

The story about his first wife is so intense, might be worth it just for that.

I'd recommend Everyman (2006) as a starting point, at least for late Roth (best Roth). It's in the same orbit as the America trilogy, really short, and SO much more bleak.

this is nice to picture

Another time Clarke [neighbor/friend] visited Roth's house, alone, knocking a long time on his door; finally, as she began to leave, he sprang out of the bushes and tackled her.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/25/theater/sabbaths-theater-philip-roth-john-turturro.html

Turturro! Hadn't heard anything about him in a long time, thanks/ Sabbaths Theater ge has a pretty good reputation, I think?
The only dramatization of Roth work I've seen is The Ghost Writer, with Mark Linn Baker as Zuckerman, on ye olde American Playhouse (somehow, the Age of Reagan was very hip for Public TV, at least first term).
I don't know why I didn't mention on WAYR last summer that this, the last Zuckerman novel (2007) has him coming back to NYC a few years after 9/11, trying to swap his boondocks home for the urban apartment of a hot young female writer, whose ex tries to hardsell the Zuck (one of them still has a prostate, dammit) on going in on a book about the long-dead, mostly forgotten Lonoff which will somehow be a success de scandale (Z. somehow knows that this young bull is the spawn of a bigtime Hollywood entertainment attorney and a very Alta California Egyptologist, with a my$tical view---b-but they're only mentioned in passing!) Youngblood's key link is the fabled Amy Bellette, still carrying a torch for Lonoff, but also a brain tumor.
Here's what I did say:

Finished Exit Ghost, which was good enough to be frustrating: I would be following Zuckerman,back and forth, tolerant of his handheld camera/baseball catcher's mask (there's usually a sense of a grid, of wires in the view, but ok; he turns the camera on himself, effectively enough at times), then one of the other characters would get into close-range deposition, spilling their guts in response to his nosy questions---he's the great novelist Zuckerman, and he wants to know! Speaking of xpost rattling machinery: some of this seems good, but there's so much of it---and this is the "real" talk, interspersed with Z.'s increasingly long-ass compulsive fantasy scripting of dialogue with the fabulous WASP literary aspirant, from the loveliest old oil money neighborhood in Houston, which Roth seems to know something about, along with a lot of other things that could have come across a lot better in third-person narration, with characters not having to explain themselves to Zuckerman, which also tends to make good scenes go on too long, as the yadda-yadda format becomes distracting.

(Also he sticks in this long okay but uncompelling thing about George Plimpton, who may have died while the book was being written, as happens in the book.)(This while some other promising material is left to become merely anecdotal, although pretty good for that.)

I found Nemesis, which I think is all third person, and looks like there aren't any writers in it, as far as I've skimmed. Will also check Everyman; thanks again for the tip

remains incredible and hilarious that he did not win the nobel

naipaul was (arguably) a bigger asshole

and then . . . dylan? DYLAN? loool

I don't think there exists a writer X for whom it's incredible X didn't win a nobel prize, there are a lot of great writers and not very many nobel prizes