An Evening with author Steven J Zipperstein
Join us for an evening with author Steven J Zipperstein to celebrate his book, "Philip Roth: Stung By Life". He will be interviewed by Rachel Kadish, author of "The Weight of Ink". The program will include an interview with the author, audience Q+A, and book signing.
Tickets:
$33 (includes a copy of the book).
Free- admission only.
About ‘Philip Roth: Stung By Life’
In this groundbreaking literary biography, Steven J. Zipperstein captures the complex life and astonishing work of Philip Roth (1933–2018), one of America’s most celebrated writers. Born in Newark, New Jersey—where his short stories and books were often set—Roth wrote with ambition and awareness of what was required to produce great literature. No writer was more dedicated to his craft, even as he was rubbing shoulders with the Kennedys and engaging in a spate of famous and infamous romances. And yet, as much as Roth wrote about sex and self, he viewed himself as socially withdrawn, living much like an “unchaste monk” (his words).
“Steven Zipperstein’s appreciation of Philip Roth is literary biography at its best. Acute and
original judgements of Roth’s written worlds come embraided with revelatory portrayals of the
worlds Roth inhabited, scrutinized, and provoked, and of Roth himself, solemn and hilarious,
voraciously curious, a boundless sensual spirit riven by his craft.”—Sean Wilentz
About Steven J Zipperstein:
Steven J. Zipperstein is Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History at Stanford University. He is the author and editor of nine books, most recently Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History (Liveright/WWW Norton, 2018).
For sixteen years Zipperstein was Director of the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford. On leave at Harvard in 2007-9, he was the Gerald Weinstock Visiting Professor of Jewish History and then Vera M. Schuyler Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Before arriving at Stanford in 1991, Zipperstein taught at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies (1981-87), and at UCLA (1987-91); he has held visiting posts at universities in France, Russia, and Poland. His first book, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794-1881 (Stanford University Press, 1985) won the Smilen Prize and was named the outstanding book on Jewish history published that year.
About Rachel Kadish:
Kadish is the award-winning author of the novels ‘The Weight of Ink’, ‘From a Sealed Room’, and ‘Tolstoy Lied: a Love Story’, as well as the novella ‘I Was Here’. Her work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Ploughshares, Paris Review, Slate, Salon, and Tin House, and has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize Anthology.
She has been a fiction fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, has received the National Jewish Book Award, the Association of Jewish Libraries Fiction Award, and the John Gardner Fiction Award, and was the Koret Writer-in-Residence at Stanford University. She lives outside Boston.