Having Roth's Cake and Eating It Too

Above is the elaborate birthday cake created for Philip Roth's 80th birthday celebration at the Newark Museum this past Tuesday.

The event was recapped by Charles McGrath in The New York Times:

On Tuesday evening, before the cake cutting, fellow writers spoke in praise of Mr. Roth in the museum auditorium. The novelist Jonathan Lethem compared a love of Mr. Roth’s work to a kind of illness, “a long readerly sickness,” and he said that all those in the auditorium were his “fellow-sanatorium inmates.” Hermione Lee, the scholar and biographer, talked about Shakespearean themes in Roth, and Alain Finkielkraut, the French philosopher spoke about the tragedy of chance and randomness in Mr. Roth’s novel Nemesis.

In time for his birthday celebration, The Library of America recently completed the definitive nine-volume edition of his works. This Saturday morning, NPR’s Weekend Edition will broadcast host Scott Simon’s interview with Philip Roth.