I saw and heard something remarkable just a few hours ago, something I’m not likely to forget until all the mechanisms of remembering are shot and I’m tucked away for good. Philip Roth celebrated his eightieth birthday in the Billy Johnson Auditorium of the Newark Museum last night with the most astonishing literary performance I’ve ever witnessed….

David Remnick on the Roth-endorsed, Roth-attended 80th birthday celebration of Philip Roth: http://nyr.kr/160afX8

(Source: newyorker.com)

Richard Brody on “Philip Roth: UnMasked” and the birth of a meme: http://nyr.kr/10wAUrn

(Source: newyorker.com)

Listen to the podcast of “Happy Birthday,” Adam Gopnik’s Comment on Philip Roth at eighty: http://nyr.kr/10Dw2EX

As the baffling and then burlesque and then baroquely burlesque affair enveloping General Petraeus and his friends, of both sexes, fell upon us like another hurricane last week, it seemed to confirm once again Philip Roth’s fifty-year-old assertion that you can’t write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent. The Petraeus story rapidly expanded, novella-like, into a kind of “Fifty Shades of Khaki.”

In Comment this week, Adam Gopnik writes about the Petraeus scandal, Philip Roth’s retirement from novels, and human nature.

David Remnick, who profiled Roth in 2000, on the author’s retirement from novels.

Photograph by Chris Maluszynski/Moment/Redux.