“Twitter like drugs for me,” Bissinger Tweeted recently. “One Tweet and then I need 75 more hits. Plus I get jealous at drycleaners if somebody has more shirts than me.” The feed of peak-era Philip Roth might have looked something like this. Though...

Could I nominate Intourist as the most hideous? For those too young to remember, I should explain that this was the state tourist agency that in the bad old days controlled all holiday visits to Russia and its satellite republics. In 1984 it...

But I’ll tell you what I do know: I know Anne Frank died in Auschwitz.” She corrects him — “It was Bergen-Belsen” — and then she “yank(s) up her shirtsleeve, revealing the fading blue-black concentration camp numbers tattooed on the inside of her pale...

Philip Roth used the same idea in his 1979 novel The Ghost Writer and, in acknowledgement, Auslander gives Roth a cameo. Auslander has more fun with the concept, though. He makes Anne Frank a hunchbacked agoraphobic who has been working on a book for...

But it

It is enough, nevertheless, to consider him one of the great short story writers, whose influence has been particularly notable in America. His semi-autobiographical games continue in the novels of Philip Roth; Grace Paley's vivid stories of the Bronx...