Alfred Kazin

Ted Solotaroff

Critical and Personal Writings

Alfred Kazin's America

Solotaroff was one of the notable intellectuals of his generation, the founder of the New American Review, editor and friend of Philip Roth, and editor-in-chief at HarperCollins. Solotaroff reveals himself here as a thinking man with a big heart and gaping wounds of love that are not disconnected from the contributions he has made to American culture throughout his career. Solotaroff turns back to the earliest pages of his romance with Lynn, remembering his first sighting of her emerging from the water as if from a dream. Yet the image, as he penetrates the intervening layers of sorrow and disappointment, is almost impossibly distant, fragile. First Loves reenacts the blurring of a perfect conception in the mind of a man who would devote his life to precision of thought and word. This opposition, of romantic and intellectual passion, drives the narrative and eventually brings it to crisis. First Loves could be described as a very private feat of honesty from a public intellectual. Solotaroff’s willingness to admit the failures, personal and professional, alongside the triumphs of his career gives a three-dimensional intensity to the emotions on the page. Working with all of the gritty and romantic elements of his storied life, Solotaroff manages to avoid a tone too heroic or honey-dipped; he manages simply to tell the tale.

A Memoir

First Loves

Shannon Ravenel

Short stories by Ian McEwan, Max Schott, Paul Bowles, Peter Marsh, James Kaplan, Joy Williams, Mark Helprin, Peter Taylor, Tim McCarthy, Stanley Elkin, Harold Brodkey, Leslie Epstein, Natalie Petesch, Robert Sorrells, Jonathan Baumbach, Joyce Carol Oates, Elizabeth Cullinan, Gilbert Sorrentino, Lhluchan Sintetos, Theodore Solotaroff, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, John Gardner, Mary Ann Malinchak Rishel, and more.

The Best American Short Stories, 1978

Gathers stories by Philip Roth, Donald Barthelme, John Hawkes, Robert Stone, John Berryman, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez

22 Stories from American Review

Many Windows

A collection of literary essays examines subjects such as Soviet censorship, Philip Roth, storytelling, Muriel Rukeyser, and the publishing business

Ted Solotaroff

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