検索キーワード： "Benjamin Taylor" 文学・フィクション

The story of Willa Cather is defined by a lifetime of determination, struggle, and gradual emergence. Some show their full powers early, yet Cather was the opposite—she took her time and transformed herself by stages. The writer who leapt to the forefront of American letters with O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918) was already well into middle age. Through years of provincial journalism in Nebraska, brief spells of teaching, and editorial work on magazines, she persevered in pursuit of the ultimate goal—literary immortality.

Marcel Proust came into his own as a novelist comparatively late in life, yet only Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky were his equals when it came to creating characters as memorably human. As biographer Benjamin Taylor suggests, Proust was a literary lightweight before writing his multivolume masterwork In Search of Lost Time, but following a series of momentous historical and personal events, he became—against all expectations—one of the greatest writers of his, and indeed any, era.

So begins Benjamin Taylor's Here We Are, the unvarnished portrait of his best friend and one of America's greatest writers. Needless to say, Philip Roth's place in the canon is secure, but what is less clear is what the man himself was like. In Here We Are, Benjamin Taylor's beautifully constructed memoir, we see him as a mortal man, experiencing the joys and sorrows of aging, reflecting on his own writing, and doing something we all love to do: passing the time in the company of his closest friend.

Courtesy of my controlling father, Marshall and I have been living together for the last couple of years. Because of his profession, we’d managed to stay out of each other’s way. His age and respect for my father is what kept him from giving in to my flirtatious advances. Over the years, we’d managed not to cross that line, until that one slightly drunken night.

Deployment is hard. War is costly. And Recon Marine Sergeant Finn Cobalt is paying the price--overseas and at home. Courageous action jeopardizes his military career. Two rescue attempts go south, and secrets strain his family relationships. As guilt stalks his footsteps, his faith is brought into question. Is there anything left? Or has it been destroyed?