Media

Article - Leonard, John. “New Books.” Harper’s Magazine,
vol. 310, no. 1859 (April 2005): 85

On a visit to Ernest Hemingway in Key West in 1935, John Dos Passos burst out laughing at a bust of Papa in his own front hall. Dos tossed his hat at the bronze head. Papa was not amused.

Although Stephen Koch in THE BREAKING POINT: HEMINGWAY. DOS PASSOS, AND THE MURDER OF JOSE ROBLES (Counterpoint, $24) would rather believe that the Spanish Civil War killed the friendship between the two writers,… READ MORE

Article - Koch, Stephen. “The Playboy Was a Spy.” The New York Times,
April 13, 2008

“Celebrity was wonderful cover,” Noël Coward said near the end of his life. “My disguise would be my own reputation as a bit of an idiot … a merry playboy.”

In 1973, a month before he died, the epitome of flippant British sophistication decided to permit himself a few clipped words about one last secret. READ MORE

Article - Payne, Stanley. The Americans in Spain, April 14, 2005.

The Spanish Civil War was the most important event in European affairs of the 1930s until the German aggression that led to World War II. It became, for a time, the cynosure of world politics, a microcosm of the greater conflicts of that era. It also became an important literary event, the focus of writers throughout Europe and the Western world in a way no “little war” had been before. The ideological and moral issues involved - or that seemed to be involved - attracted and stimulated writers as nothing else. READ MORE

Article - Koch, Stephen. “Remember Arthur Koestler,” The New York Sun. August 23, 2005.

Arthur Koestler, that one-time titan in the Cold and culture wars, was born 100 years ago this year. Those who remember him tend to think of Koestler (in more or less descending order of interest) as a high journalist of near genius; a battle-hardened and even invincible polemicist; a scientific popularizer of something well short of genius; a dubious dabbler in the occult. But that is not all. READ MORE

Review - The Breaking Point

“An unlovely portrait of the engagé artist as useful idiot. Its small drama leads directly to all the big questions about the nature of the Spanish Civil War…A series of vividly rendered scenes connected by intelligent commentary.”

–George Packer, The New Yorker

Review - Double Lives

“A magnificent tapestry—the clandestine underworld of Europe in mid-century brought back to life.”

–Alan Furst, author of Night Soldiers

Review - Night Watch

“[A] very serious and ultimately compelling novel…Mr. Koch has made an original journey into the recesses of language and pathology; his control is superb; his achievement, disquieting.”

–John Leonard, The New York Times

Review - Double Lives

“After decades in which so much writing about the Cold War was forced through one ideological screen or another, Stephen Koch has written a thrilling and, what’s more, fair book about one of the strangest episodes of an era. He has handled the portrait of Willi Munzenberg and the gallery of Western intellectuals with the skill of a superb novelist and the rigor of a true historian.”

–David Remnick, author of Lenin’s Tomb

Review - Stargzer: The Life, World and Films of Andy Warhol

“Koch’s book makes clear the essence of Warhol’s work”

–The New York Times Book Review

Review - The Bachelors’ Bride

“Stephen Koch has written a marvelous novel, one that dances with as much intelligence as grace and with a threatening intensity as well. Thus one reads The Bachelor’s Bride carefully: one might miss something, and it may explode in one’s hands, too. All the good books we love seem to promise a certain psychic violence, and The Bachelor’s Bride is of this high order.”

–Russell Banks