‘The Horse’ is what I’d called Roth when he and I shared an office space in the late 60s while he was working on Portnoy’s Complaint and I was working on a similar but superior work, Feldman’s Penis. Roth had earned his nickname because he ate a lot of apples and oats, and also because he loved to saddle up with the shiksas. No one knows a writer as well as his contemporaries. Roth and I are as contemporary as they get.
At the Jewish Daily Forward, Neal Pollack — he of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature — takes on the retirement of his “contemporary,” Philip Roth.
