Benjamin Taylor

“If you never met Philip Roth, you can now, for Ben Taylor’s new hook enacts a kind of resurrection. In addition to bringing a mastery of the writer’s work, Taylor has somehow managed to conjure the living man—someone I found wholly at odds with his public persona. Here is the Roth I knew rendered at his most antic, hilarious, rancorous, tender. Forget the work of Boswell's Johnson, I have never read a more touching portrait of literary friendship. Smart, moving, wise—Taylor’s page-turning book sets a new standard for both memoir and literary biography." —Mary Karr, author of The Liars Club

“A poignant and frequently poetic tribute to a friendship abundant with laughter, erudition, generosity, devotion, and grace.” —Lisa Halliday, author of Asymmetry

“Benjamin Taylor and Philip Roth lived for a time in friendship -- that rare, true element. Like that friendship, this account is unsparing, yet loyal and kind. It is also funny. Here We Are made me laugh until its last pages. I was in tears when I closed the book. I had to read it over again, immediately. I'm grateful to have it." —Louise Erdrich, author of The Night Watchman

“Rare and remarkable. A pleasure to read as a revival of Philip's presence, of course, but also as a beautifully novelistic study of two very different men converging on a shared set of obsessions and mutual comforts. Taylor preserves his hero without entombing him. It's Roth to the life." —Adam Gopnik

“A marvel of a book—elegant, touching, singular.” —Mary Karr

“Historic and cultural incidents dot the crackling narrative . . . Taylor, a lyrical wordsmith, broadens the usual boundaries of memoir writing with his analysis of time and childhood . . . In this skillful blend of dialogue between youth and maturity, Taylor sums up the value and quality of the years of his treasured past and unforgettable present, while stressing the sanctity of life.”
-- Publishers Weekly

“Taylor’s endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different emotional upheavals, fired Proust’s imagination and, albeit sometimes completely transformed, appeared in his work. The result is a very subtle, thought-provoking book.”—Anka Muhlstein, author of Balzac’s Omelette and Monsieur Proust’s Library