Bücher von Roger Rosenblatt

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 OatesBeet 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

Harry March is something of a wreck and more than half nuts. Up until now, he has lived peacefully on an island in the Hamptons with his talking dog, Hector, a born-again Evangelical and unapologetic capitalist. But March's life starts to completely unravel when Lapham--an ostentatious multimillionaire who made his fortune on asparagus tongs--begins construction of a gargantuan mansion just across the way. To Harry, Lapham's monstrosity-to-be represents the fetid and corrupt excess that has ruined modern civilization. Which means, quite simply, that this is war.

The author of the deft Rules for Aging returns with thirty hilarious and engaging tales about the everyday human comedy, forcing the reader to laugh out loud at the silliness of the world.Funny, ironic, and penetrating, Anything Can Happen is another rich and rewarding collection that demonstrates the agile wit that has endeared Roger Rosenblatt to readers everywhere.

The acclaimed, award-winning essayist and memoirist returns to fiction with this reflective, bittersweet tale that introduces the irrepressible aging poet Thomas Murphya paean to the mystery, tragedy and wonder of life.Trying his best to weasel out of an appointment with the neurologist his only child, Mire, has cornered him into, the poet Thomas Murphysinger of the oldies, friend of the down-and-out, card sharp, raconteur, piano bar player, bon vivant, tough and honest and all-around good guycontemplates his sunset years. Mire 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 Murphs jumps from fact to memory to fancy, conjuring the islands that have shaped himInishmaan, 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 Murphys 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.

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.