This is a detailed, wide-ranging interview with the Booker-Prize-winning novelist, broadcaster and public intellectual Howard Jacobson, conducted by the author of the only monograph on his work. On the eve of the publication of his memoir, Mother's Boy, Jacobson discusses that work, his relationship with his parents, his attitude towards other novelists, and his views on, among other things, Jewishness, antisemitism, poetry, art, television and Trump.
David Brauner is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Reading (UK). He is co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Modern Jewish Fiction (2015) and the author of four books: Post-War Jewish Fiction: Ambivalence, Self-Explanation and Transatlantic Connections (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2001); Philip Roth (Manchester University Press, 2007); Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2010); and Howard Jacobson (Manchester University Press, 2020).