Novelist Philip Roth is the longest-serving member in the literature department of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been a member so long he can recall when the academy included now all-but-forgotten figures like Malcom Cowley and Glenway Wescott. Roth recently joined William Faulkner, Henry James and Jack London as one of the rare Americans to be included in the French Pleiades editions (which is the model for our own Library of America), writes The New York Times. The Italian publisher Mondadori is also bringing out Roth’s work in its Meridiani series of classic authors. Other late-life awards include the Spanish Prince of Asturias Award in 2012 and being named a commander in the Légion d’Honneur of France in 2013. The Times writes that these awards seem to both gratify and amuse him. Roth famously announced that he was retiring from writing in 2012, at the age of 80. Since then, he lives the pleasant life of a retiree on the Upper West Side. He sees friends, goes to concerts, checks email, watches movies, the usual. The Times sat down with Roth to talk to him about retirement, Trump and the #metoo movement. One of Roth’s recurrent themes was male sexual desire and its many manifestations. He told The Times, “I’ve stepped not just inside the male head but into the reality of those urges whose obstinate pressure by its persistence can menace one’s rationality, urges sometimes so intense they may even be experienced as a form of lunacy. Consequently, none of the more extreme conduct I have been reading about in the newspapers lately has astonished me.”
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