"What Is What Was," Richard Stern's fifth "orderly miscellany," is the first to meaningfully combine his fiction and nonfiction. Stories, such as the already well-known "My Ex, the Moral Philosopher," appear among portraits (of the sort Hugh Kenner praised as "almost the invention of a new genre"): Auden, Pound, Ellison, Terkel, W. C. Fields, Bertrand Russell, Walter Benjamin (in both essay and story), Jung and Freud, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger.
In the book's seven sections are analyses of the Wimbledon tennis tournament as an Anglification machine, of Silicon Valley at its shaky...

Ez Keneret and Wendell Spear are Hollywood veterans who have committed the only sin in the movie business: they've grown old. Having been cast aside by younger producers, directors, writers, reviewers, actors, and even their own families, the two friends must confront both their obsolescence and the harsh reality that the art they appreciate (and profit from) is really just a business powered by money and celebrity.
Spear, fading in the Malibu hills, is consoled and diverted by his granddaughter, Jennifer Abarbanel, a San Francisco lawyer. Keneret, given one more chance to make a film by...