A fourth installment of classics features the author's literary alter ego character, Nathan Zuckerman, in a single-volume collection that includes the pieces The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, and The Prague Orgy. 15,000 first printing.[...]
Gathered together for the first time in this seventh volume of The Library of America's definitive edition of Philip Roth's collected works is the acclaimed "American Trilogy," a major milestone in contemporary American literature. In "American Pastoral" (1997), Swede Levov is wrenched from the tran[...]
The definitive Philip Roth edition continues with three novels written in his late sixties and early seventies. "The Dying Animal "(2001) marks the final return of David Kepesh from "The Breast "(1972) and "The Professor""of Desire "(1977). Now an eminent cultural critic in his sixties, Kepesh exper[...]
What kind of choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand the onslaught of circumstance? These are the dark questions that animate "Nemeses," the quartet of thematically related short novels that are published here together for the first time in this final volume of The Library of[...]
Volume 2 in what will be the definitive 8-volume collector's edition of Philip Roth's fiction includes Portnoy's Complaint, Our Gang, When She Was Good, and The Breast.[...]
An anthology of three major works includes The Great American Novel, a farcical celebration of baseball; My Life as a Man, which follows a tragic marriage of obsessive need; and The Professor of Desire, in which a man ventures into the world of erotic possibilities.[...]
I Married a Communist is the story of the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who begins life as a teenage ditch digger in 1930s Newark, becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, and is destroyed, both as a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witch-hunt of the 1950s. In his heyday as[...]
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s; a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his literary idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman mee[...]
It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town an ageing classics professor, Coleman Silk is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real ruth about S[...]
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 [...]
As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself 'a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes'. Little does he realise how prophetic this motto will be - or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of his childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from [...]
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[...]
David Kapesh, white-haired and over 60, is a TV culture critic and lecturer at a New York college. He meets Consuela, a 24-year-old student, daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who puts his life into erotic disorder and haunts him for the next eight years.[...]
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[...]
Now in his mid-thirties, Nathan Zuckerman, a would-be recluse despite his newfound fame as a bestselling author, ventures onto the streets of Manhattan in the final year of the turbulent sixties. Not only is he assumed by his fans to be his own fictional satyr, Gilbert Carnovsky, but he also finds h[...]
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 Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative exis[...]
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[...]
Tells the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin, he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills, who meet one summer break and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. This novella is also accompanied by five short stories.[...]
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[...]
A fiction-within-a-fiction, a labyrinthine edifice of funny, mournful, and harrowing meditations on the fatal impasse between a man and a woman, My Life as a Man is Roth's most blistering novel. At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol, a gifted young writer and the woman who wan[...]
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.[...]
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'[...]
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[...]
Summer, 1944. In the 'stifling heat of equatorial Newark', a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, even death. Vigorous, decent, twenty-three year old playground director Bucky Cantor is devoted to his charges an[...]