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All The News That’s Fit To Print After the Fact

The ‘Times’ literally catches up with Howard Jacobson

by
Marc Tracy
October 19, 2010
Howard Jacobson, victorious, last week.(Stuart Wilson/Getty Images)
Howard Jacobson, victorious, last week.(Stuart Wilson/Getty Images)

Today, the New York Times Arts section published a mini-profile of this year’s winner of the prestigious Man Booker Prize, who—in case you hadn’t heard—was Howard Jacobson, an English-Jewish author. “I’m an old-fashioned English lit. man,” he tells the Times. “Straight down the line—it’s George Eliot, it’s Dickens, it’s Dr. Johnson, it’s Jane Austen.”

If you wanted to read something much like the above, only before he won the Booker (as opposed to, say, a week after he did), you could have checked our interview with him, which ran last Monday.

If you now want to read something amazing by Jacobson and haven’t had time to run out to your nearest bookstore and pick up the winning novel, The Finkler Question, you can read his amazing profile of American ping-pong legend Marty Reisman.

And if you want to read an actual review of the Man Booker-winning book … well, unfortunately the Times can’t help you there. But Tablet Magazine books critic Adam Kirsch gave it the full treatment at the beginning of the month. (He hated it. Kidding!)

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.