What if a lookalike stranger stole your name, usurped your biography, and went about the world pretending to be you? In this tour de force of fact and fiction, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring the State of Israel, promoting a [...]

Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933-)] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus a[...]

Nathan Zuckerman is visiting Prague, where intellectuals come searching for Kafta, where misfits who don't submit decently to their misfortunes act out a comedy of manners in decadence. Here Zuckerman meets Olga, and brings home lessons for the American writer - lessons about oppression and resilien[...]

Like a latter-day Gregor Samsa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed. But where Kafka's protagonist turned into a giant beetle, the narrator of this fantasy has become a 155-pound female breast. What follows is a funny exploration of the implications of Ke[...]

When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide inthe1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh publicly blamed the Jews for pushing America towards a pointless war with Naz[...]

The interviews, essays and articles collected in this book span a quarter of a century of Philip Roth's distinguished career and 'reveal a preoccupation with the relationship between the written and the unwritten world.' Here is Roth on himself and his work and the controversies it's engendered. Her[...]

Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret and stoicism. The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, to his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of[...]

Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Micky Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his long-time mistress - an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring exceeds even his own - Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past.[...]

It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he here and not at a local college in Newark where[...]

Everything is over for Simon Axler. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent and his assurance. When he goes on stage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His wife has gone, his audience has left him, his agent can'[...]

Sabbath's Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is its gargantuan hero. Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his long-time mistress - an erotic free spirit whose[...]

A famous writer, named Philip, and his mistress meet in a room without a bed. They talk, they play games with each other, they have sex, they tell lies. DECEPTION, Philip Roth's most poignant and provocative work since Portnoy's Complaint, explores adultery and the unmasking of illicit lovers in a n[...]

Patrimony, a true story, touches the emotions as strongly a anything Philip Roth has ever written. Philip Roth watches as his eighty-six-year-old father - famous for his vigour, his charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollection - battles with the brain tumour that will kill him. The son, full of [...]