Roger Rosenblatt

For more than forty years, distinguished author Roger Rosenblatt has also been a teacher of writing, guiding students with the same intelligence and generosity he brings to the page, answering the difficult questions about what makes a story good, an essay shapely, a novel successful, and the most profound and essential question of them all—why write? Unless It Moves the Human Heart details one semester in Rosenblatt's "Writing Everything" class. In a series of funny, intimate conversations, a diverse group of students—from Inur, a young woman whose family is from Pakistan, to Sven, an ex–fighter pilot—grapples with the questions and subjects most important to narrative craft. Delving into their varied lives, Rosenblatt brings readers closer to them, emotionally investing us in their failures and triumphs. More than a how-to for writers and aspiring writers, more than a memoir of teaching, Unless It Moves the Human Heart is a deeply felt and impassioned plea for the necessity of writing in our lives. As Rosenblatt wisely reminds us, "Writing is the cure for the disease of living. Doing it may sometimes feel like an escape from the world, but at its best moments it is an act of rescue."

The Craft and Art of Writing

Unless It Moves the Human Heart

Rule #1: It doesn’t matter. One of USA Today’s Best Self-Help Books of the Year: “Hilarious.” —People Prize-winning essayist Roger Rosenblatt has commented on some of the most important trends and events of our time in insightful columns in Time and discerning commentaries on PBSNewshour with Jim Lehrer. But at the dawn of a new millennium, Roger found himself facing an issue that he couldn’t talk his way out of: getting old. Luckily, aging couldn’t dull his wit, and he turned his sharp pen to creating a survival manual for the twilight of life. These fifty-four brilliant, funny, and indispensable rules range from how to handle a bad hair day (or a no hair day) to knowing the difference between humor and comedy to learning that, in the end, none of these little worries really matter. Practical, wise, and funny, Rules for Aging offers not only a new mantra for an older generation but “a guide for those in the younger generation who want to learn from the mistakes of their elders” (Newsday).

A Wry and Witty Guide to Life

Rules for Aging

resist normal impulses, live longer, attain perfection

Rules for aging

The Washington Post hailed Roger Rosenblatt's Making Toast as "a textbook on what constitutes perfect writing," and People lauded Kayak Morning as "intimate, expansive and profoundly moving." Classic tales of love and grief, the New York Times bestselling memoirs are also original literary works that carve out new territory at the intersection of poetry and prose. Now comes The Boy Detective, a story of the author's childhood in New York City, suffused with the same mixture of acute observation and bracing humor, lyricism and wit. Resisting the deadening silence of his family home in the elegant yet stiflingly safe neighborhood of Gramercy Park, nine-year-old Roger imagines himself a private eye in pursuit of criminals. With the dreamlike mystery of the city before him, he sets off alone, out into the streets of Manhattan, thrilling to a life of unsolved cases. Six decades later, Rosenblatt finds himself again patrolling the territory of his youth: The writing class he teaches has just wrapped up, releasing him into the winter night and the very neighborhood in which he grew up. A grown man now, he investigates his own life and the life of the city as he walks, exploring the New York of the 1950s; the lives of the writers who walked these streets before him, such as Poe and Melville; the great detectives of fiction and the essence of detective work; and the monuments of his childhood, such as the New York Public Library, once the site of an immense reservoir that nourished the city with water before it nourished it with books, and the Empire State Building, which, in Rosenblatt's imagination, vibrates sympathetically with the oversize loneliness of King Kong: "If you must fall, fall from me." As he walks, he is returned to himself, the boy detective on the case. Just as Rosenblatt invented a world for himself as a child, he creates one on this night—the writer a detective still, the chief suspect in the case of his own life, a case that discloses the shared mysteries of all our lives. A masterly evocation of the city and a meditation on memory as an act of faith, The Boy Detective treads the line between a novel and a poem, displaying a world at once dangerous and beautiful.

A New York Childhood

The Boy Detective

From Roger Rosenblatt, author of the bestsellers Making Toast and Unless It Moves the Human Heart, comes a moving meditation on the passages of grief, the solace of solitude, and the redemptive power of love In Making Toast, Roger Rosenblatt shared the story of his family in the days and months after the death of his thirty-eight-year-old daughter, Amy. Now, in Kayak Morning, he offers a personal meditation on grief itself. “Everybody grieves,” he writes. From that terse, melancholy observation emerges a work of art that addresses the universal experience of loss. On a quiet Sunday morning, two and a half years after Amy’s death, Roger heads out in his kayak. He observes,“You can’t always make your way in the world by moving up. Or down, for that matter. Boats move laterally on water, which levels everything. It is one of the two great levelers.” Part elegy, part quest, Kayak Morning explores Roger’s years as a journalist, the comforts of literature, and the value of solitude, poignantly reminding us that grief is not apart from life but encompasses it. In recalling to us what we have lost, grief by necessity resurrects what we have had.

Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats

Kayak Morning

“A painfully beautiful memoir….Written with such restraint as to be both heartbreaking and instructive.” —E. L. Doctorow A revered, many times honored (George Polk, Peabody, and Emmy Award winner, to name but a few) journalist, novelist, and playwright, Roger Rosenblatt shares the unforgettable story of the tragedy that changed his life and his family. A book that grew out of his popular December 2008 essay in The New Yorker, Making Toast is a moving account of unexpected loss and recovery in the powerful tradition of About Alice and The Year of Magical Thinking. Writer Ann Beattie offers high praise to the acclaimed author of Lapham Rising and Beet for a memoir that is, “written so forthrightly, but so delicately, that you feel you’re a part of this family.”

A Family Story

Making Toast

For those who write and those who want to, a book on the joys and fascinations of the literary life by an author whose work has pleased millions.

Mad about the Writing Life

The Story I Am

The beloved New York Times bestselling author Making Toast and Kayak Morning returns with a powerful meditation on a universal subject: love. In The Book of Love, Roger Rosenblatt explores love in all its moods and variations—romantic love, courtship, battle, mystery, marriage, heartbreak, fury, confusion, melancholy, delirium, ecstasy; love of family, of friends; love of home, of country, of work, of writing, of solitude, of art; love of nature; love of life itself. Rosenblatt is on a quest to illuminate this elusive and essential emotion, to define this thing called love. Cleverly using lines from love songs to create a flowing ballad—as infectious and engaging as a jazz riff—he intersperses fictional vignettes that capture lovers in different situations, ages, and temperaments along with notes addressed to “you,” his wife of fifty years. “The story I have to tell is of you. Of others, too. Other people, other things. But mainly of you. It begins and ends with you. It always comes back to you.” Lively yet profound, poignant yet joyous, The Book of Love is a triumph of intellect and imagination: a personal discourse on love that is both novel and timeless.

Improvisations on a Crazy Little Thing

The Book of Love

Rosenblatt's hymn to our noblest qualities: embracing life, sharing love, and accepting responsibility toward one another.

On Life, Love, and Responsibility

Cold Moon

Beet College is doomed...and nobody really cares. The Board of Trustees, led by developer Joel Bollovate, has squandered the endowment. Debutante-cum-self-styled-poet Matha Polite, an indiscriminate radical with a four-student following, wants to bring the institution down. Sweet-tempered terrorist hopeful Akim Ben Ladin (né Arthur Horowitz) sits in his off-campus cave and dreams about blowing Beet up. Faculty members are too busy concocting useless, trendy courses to do anything about it. Not to mention that American higher education is going down the tubes, one less lesser school isn't going to matter. So why is Professor Peace Porterfield trying to save Beet? Beats us.

A Novel

Beet

When his daughter, Amy, collapses and dies from an asymptomatic heart condition, Rosenblatt and his wife leave their home on Long Island to move in with their son-in-law and their three young grandchildren. He peels back the layers on this most personal of losses to create a testament to familial love.

a family story

Making toast

"In Life Itself, Roger Rosenblatt redefines the debate on abortion and offers a resolution." "Through columns in leading publications and his on-air essays for The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, Rosenblatt has become widely recognized as America's preeminent commentator on social and moral issues. In this book, he turns to the most bitterly divisive social question of our time." ""Give abortion five seconds of thought and it quickly spirals down in the mind to the most basic questions about human life, to the mysteries of birth and our relationship with our souls," he writes. "It is difficult to disentangle, much less express, the feelings it engenders."" "Yet what we have seen in this country over the past twenty years has been the political warfare of extremists, not honest discussion among ordinary citizens with differing views." "Life Itself attempts to establish an "uncommon ground" on abortion by using the deep ambivalence the great majority of Americans feel about the problem toward its resolution. We live in uncomfortable but manageable conflict on a number of important national issues, Rosenblatt writes. It is time to learn to live with conflicted feelings on abortion as well." "To make his case, Rosenblatt traces the 4,000-year history of abortion, demonstrating that all civilizations have dealt with conflict on the issue, and have fashioned their resolutions to meet their particular structure and needs." "Why then do Americans alone in history have so hard a time doing the same? Rosenblatt answers this provocative question by examining specific American characteristics of thought that have become particularly explosive when touched by abortion." "Finally, through a series of interviews and speculations, Rosenblatt determines that the country is more united in its attitudes about abortion than the political warriors would have us believe. In the end, he presents a formula by which we may begin to recognize and live with one another on this matter in spite of, and within, our divided views:" ""To create a society in which abortion is permitted and its gravity appreciated is to create but another of the many useful frictions of a democracy. Such a society does not devalue life by allowing abortion; it takes life with utmost seriousness, and is, by the depth of its conflicts and the richness of its difficulties, a reflection of life itself.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Abortion in the American Mind

Life Itself

Multiple award-winner Roger Rosenblatt has received glowing critical acclaim for his exceptional literary works—from the hilarious novels Lapham Rising and Beet to his poignant, heartbreaking, ultimately inspiring memoir Making Toast. With Unless It Moves the Human Heart, the revered novelist, essayist, playwright, and respected writing teacher offers a guidebook for aspiring authors, a memoir, and an impassioned argument for the necessity of writing in our world. In the tradition of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Rosenblatt’s Unless It Moves the Human Heart provides practical insights and advice on the craft, exquisitely presented by one of contemporary literature’s living treasures.

From O magazine to the New York Times, from authors such as E. L. Doctorow to Ann Beattie, critics and writers across the country have hailed Roger Rosenblatt's Making Toast as an evocative, moving testament to the enduring power of a parent's love and the bonds of family. When Roger's daughter, Amy—a gifted doctor, mother, and wife—collapses and dies from an asymptomatic heart condition at age thirty-eight, Roger and his wife, Ginny, leave their home on the South Shore of Long Island to move in with their son-in-law, Harris, and their three young grandchildren: six-year-old Jessica, four-year-old Sammy, and one-year-old James, known as Bubbies. Long past the years of diapers, homework, and recitals, Roger and Ginny—Boppo and Mimi to the kids—quickly reaccustom themselves to the world of small children: bedtime stories, talking toys, play-dates, nonstop questions, and nonsequential thought. Though reeling from Amy's death, they carry on, reconstructing a family, sustaining one another, and guiding three lively, alert, and tenderhearted children through the pains and confusions of grief. As he marvels at the strength of his son-in-law and the tenacity and skill of his wife, Roger attends each day to "the one household duty I have mastered"—preparing the morning toast perfectly to each child's liking. Luminous, precise, and utterly unsentimental, Making Toast is both a tribute to the singular Amy and a brave exploration of the human capacity to move through and live with grief.

A collection of essays, reportage, and criticism features a profile of Ronald Reagan, an award-winning article on Hiroshima, and essays on poetry, heroism, and Richard Nixon

Essays and Stories

The Man in the Water

The acclaimed, award-winning essayist and memoirist returns to fiction with this reflective, bittersweet tale that introduces the irrepressible aging poet Thomas Murphy—a paean to the mystery, tragedy and wonder of life. Trying his best to weasel out of an appointment with the neurologist his only child, Máire, has cornered him into, the poet Thomas Murphy—singer of the oldies, friend of the down-and-out, card sharp, raconteur, piano bar player, bon vivant, tough and honest and all-around good guy—contemplates his sunset years. Máire worries that Murph is losing his memory. Murph wonders what to do with the rest of his life. The older mind is at issue, and Murph’s jumps from fact to memory to fancy, conjuring the islands that have shaped him—Inishmaan, a rocky gumdrop off the Irish coast where he was born, and New York, his longtime home. He muses on the living, his daughter and precocious grandson William, and on the dead, his dear wife Oona, and Greenberg, his best friend. Now, into Murphy’s world comes the lovely Sarah, a blind woman less than half his age, who sees into his heart, as he sees into hers. Brought together under the most unlikely circumstance, Murph and Sarah begin in friendship and wind up in impossible possible love. An Irishman, a dreamer, a poet, Murph, like Whitman, sings lustily of himself and of everyone. Through his often-extravagant behavior and observations, both hilarious and profound, we see the world in all its strange glory, equally beautiful and ridiculous. With memory at the center of his thoughts, he contemplates its power and accuracy and meaning. Our life begins in dreams, but does not stay with them, Murph reminds us. What use shall we make of the past? Ultimately, he asks, are relationships our noblest reason for living? Behold the charming, wistful, vibrant, aging Thomas Murphy, whose story celebrates the ageless confusion that is this dreadful, gorgeous life.

Thomas Murphy

Roger Rosenblatt’s dazzling comic gifts are on enviable display....Beet will settle the issue: is Roger Rosenblatt our most audacious comic visionary,or our most audacious visionary comic?”—Joyce Carol Oates Beet College is doomed...and nobody really cares. The Board of Trustees, led by developer Joel Bollovate, has squandered the endowment. Debutante-cum-self-styled-poet Matha Polite, an indiscriminate radical with a four-student following, wants to bring the institution down. Sweet-tempered terrorist hopeful Akim Ben Ladin (né Arthur Horowitz) sits in his off-campus cave and dreams about blowing Beet up. Faculty members are too busy concocting useless, trendy courses to do anything about it. Not to mention that American higher education is going down the tubes, one less lesser school isn’t going to matter. So why is Professor Peace Porterfield trying to save Beet? Beats us. “Rosenblatt [applies] his sharp wit to elite education.”—Wall Street Journal

Consider this paradox: Ecologists estimate that it would take three planets Earth to provide an American standard of living to the entire world. Yet it is that standard of living to which the whole world aspires.In Consuming Desires, award-winning writer and social commentator Roger Rosenblatt brings together a brilliant collection of thinkers and writers to shed light on the triumphs and tragedies of that disturbing paradox. The book represents a captivating salon, offering a rich and varied dialogue on the underlying roots of consumer culture and its pervasive impact on ourselves and the world around us. Each author offers a unique perspective, their layers of thoughts and insights building together to create a striking, multifaceted picture of our society and culture.Jane Smiley probes the roots of consumerism in the emancipation of women from household drudgery afforded by labor-saving devices and technological innovation; Alex Kotlowitz describes the mutual reinforcement of fashion trends as poor inner-city kids and rich suburban kids strive to imitate each other; Bill McKibben discusses the significance, and the irony, of defining yourself not by what you buy, but by what you don't buy.The essays range widely, but two ideas are central to nearly all of them: that consumption is driven by yearning and desire -- often unspoken, seemingly insatiable -- and that what prevents us from keeping our consumptive impulse in check is the western concept of self, the solitary and restless self, entitled to all it can pay for.As Rosenblatt explains in his insightful introduction: "Individualism and desire are what makes us great and what makes us small. Freedom is our dream and our enemy. The essays touch on these paradoxes, and while all are too nuanced and graceful to preach easy reform, they give an idea of what reform means, where it is possible, and, in some cases, where it may not be as desirable as it appears."

Consumption, Culture, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Consuming Desires

Wanneer Roger Rosenblatts dochter Amy op haar achtendertigste plotseling sterft, laat ze haar man en hun drie jonge kinderen ontredderd achter. Roger en zijn vrouw besluiten tijdelijk in te trekken bij hun wanhopige schoonzoon. In diepe rouw proberen ze hun kleinkinderen in ieder geval een schim van hun normale leven terug te geven, terwijl hun vader worstelt met zijn allesverterende verdriet. Het resultaat is een diepontroerend eerbetoon aan Amy en een liefdevolle lofzang op familiebanden. Herinneringen aan Amy is een gevoelig geschreven boek over het verlies van een dochter en een moeder. Roger Rosenblatt beschrijft op herkenbare wijze de woede, de machteloosheid en het verdriet om het overlijden van Amy, maar ook de kleine momenten van vreugde en geluk in de maanden die erop volgen. Dit boek leest als een verzameling momentopnames, door de kracht van het weglaten ontstaat een indringend document dat de lezer niet snel loslaat.

Roger Rosenblatt

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