Books by Philip Roth

Book SynopsisIn a novel of alternative history, aviation hero and isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, negotiating a cordial accord with Adolf Hitler, accepting his conquest of Europe and anti-Semitic policies, and igniting a storm of fear for Jewish families throughout America. National Book Critics Circle Award. Reader''s Guide available. Reprint. 500,000 first printing.

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Book Synopsis'A tragedy of classical proportions...a magnificent novel' The TimesDiscover the Pulitzer-prize winning novel that confirmed Philip Roth as one of the greatest American writers.'Swede' Levov is living the American dream. He glides through life cocooned by his devoted family, lucrative business, sporting prowess and good looks. He is the embodiment of thriving, post-war America, land of liberty and hope. Until one sunny day in 1968, when Swede's daughter, Merry, commits an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism and the Levov family is plunged into mayhem. Extraordinarily nuanced and poignant, American Pastoral is the first in an eloquent trilogy of post-war American novels that still resonates today._________________PRAISE FOR AMERICAN PASTORAL:'Angry, grieving, witty, acute' Sunday Times'A profound and personal meditation on the changes in the American psyche over the last fifty years' Financial Times'A momentous novel' Observer'Utterly tragic and compelling' TatlerTrade ReviewMarvellous... Raging and elegaic * Guardian *Full of insight, full of sharp ironic twists, full of wisdom about American idealism, and full of terrific fun... A profound and personal meditation on the changes in the American psyche over the last fifty years * Financial Times *A tragedy of classical proportions...a magnificent novel * The Times *Wonderful, rich...entirely gripping * Sunday Telegraph *A momentous novel * Observer *

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Book Synopsis''Subtle, funny and furious'' ObserverWhat if a lookalike stranger stole your name, hijacked your biography, and went about the world pretending to be you? Startlingly, Philip Roth meets a man in Jerusalem called Philip Roth who has been touring Israel - riding high on the author''s reputation - preaching a bizarre reverse-exodus of the Jews, encouraging them to return to their ancestral homes in Europe. Roth decides to stop him, even if that means impersonating the impersonator.Operation Shylock is at once spy story, political thriller, meditation on identity and unfathomable journey through a volatile, frightening middle-east.Trade ReviewSubtle, funny and furious * Observer *An astoundingly accomplished piece of work * Guardian *Nothing short of stunning * London Review of Books *A very buoyant book, part truth, part fiction, combining sophistication with an equally beguiling vulgarity...it does leave one relishing it and wanting to read more * Spectator *

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Book SynopsisIt is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town a distinguished classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues allege that he is a racist. The charge is unfounded, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser.Trade ReviewThe Human Stain pulses with the strengths that make Roth a prime contender for the status of the most impressive novelist now writing in and about America * Sunday Times *An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand' * Sunday Telegraph *One of his very best... There are passages of such sustained brilliance here that I found myself going over them again and again in gaping disbelief. An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand * Sunday Telegraph *A novel so furious in its telling, with a plot so intricate in its construction that it is infused with a kind of diabolic joy. A masterpiece * Mail on Sunday *[A] tender, shocking and incendiary story on the failure of the American dream refracted through the prism of race -- Arifa Akbar * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisIt's the sweltering summer of 1944, and Newark is in the grip of a terrifying epidemic. Decent, athletic twenty-three year old playground director Bucky Cantor is devoted to his charges and ashamed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries.Trade ReviewHeart-wrenchingly powerful * Sunday Times *A mesmerically imagined work of realism... A shocking gem... A masterclass in literature and life, that reaches into the pits of the dead * Guardian *What makes Roth such an important novelist is the effortless way he brings together the trivial and the profoundly serious * Independent *A masterful performance * Spectator *Nemesis is an artfully constructed suspenseful novel with a cunning twist -- J.M. Coetzee

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Book SynopsisTells the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin, he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills, who meet one summer and fall into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. This novella is accompanied by five short stories - sometimes iconoclastic, sometimes elegiac.Trade ReviewStartlingly, incandescently alive * New Yorker *Unlike those of us who come howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr Roth appears with nails, hair, teeth, speaking coherently. He is skilled, witty, energetic and performs like a virtuoso -- Saul BellowA great novella - amazingly, this was Roth's first book - about love, sex and growing up * Observer *Opening the first page of any Philip Roth is like hearing the ignition on a boiler roar into life. Passion is what we're going to get, and plenty of it * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisPhilip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus a collection of stories, and a novella for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy's Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of America's finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave Trade ReviewRoth is a living master * New York Review of Books *When She Was Good, both its sustained theme and its detail work, is a step above most recent novels... Roth is a serious writer, willing to turn his face against fashion and the expected, and to take improbable chances' * New York Times *High, careful tragedy, nasty as life, and Roth emerges...as a Dreiser who can write! -- Stanley ElkinCompassion mingles with horror in a superb portrayal of a young woman's obsession with moral rectitude * Saturday Review *

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Book SynopsisPhilip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus a collection of stories, and a novella for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy's Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of America's finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave Trade ReviewA passionate and coruscating American tragedy * Financial Times *Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity * Mail on Sunday *One of the great political novels of our age; a card-carrying Shakespearean tragedy with New Jersey dirt beneath its fingernails -- Xan Brooks * Guardian *Quintessential Philip Roth * Sunday Telegraph *A magnificent novel of ideas, a disquisition on the fallout of the death of ideology * Observer *

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Book SynopsisThe American psyche is channelled into the gripping story of one man. This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Philip Roth at his very best. It is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president. In a small New England town a distinguished professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues allege that he is a racist. The charge is unfounded, the persecution needless, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret that he has kept for fifty years. This is the conclusion to Roth’s brilliant trilogy of post-war America – a story of seismic shifts in American history and a personal search for renewal and regeneration.'An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand' Sunday TelegraphTrade ReviewThe Human Stain pulses with the strengths that make Roth a prime contender for the status of the most impressive novelist now writing in and about America * Sunday Times *One of his very best... There are passages of such sustained brilliance here that I found myself going over them again and again in gaping disbelief. An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand * Sunday Telegraph *A novel so furious in its telling, with a plot so intricate in its construction that it is infused with a kind of diabolic joy. A masterpiece * Mail on Sunday *[A] tender, shocking and incendiary story on the failure of the American dream refracted through the prism of race -- Arifa Akbar * Guardian *One of the most beautiful books I've ever read * Red *

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Book SynopsisAs a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself as 'a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes' - an identity that will cling to him for a lifetime.Trade ReviewPhilip Roth is a great historian of modern eroticism * Milan Kundera *A thoughtful, even gentle, stylistically elegant novel about the paradox of male desire, that lacerating passion which may lead to happiness but cannot survive it * New York Times Book Review *He writes so well. His prose is both elegant and furious. It can be witty, tender and brutal in a single paragraph -- Melvyn BraggNo one writing can juggle the somber and the ludicrous more adroitly than Roth * The Time *A profound and commanding book... There is great beauty in it, humanity and tenderness * Sunday Telegraph *

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Book SynopsisPhilip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus a collection of stories, and a novella for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy's Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of America's finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave voice to the complexities of the American experience in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Roth's lasting contribution to literature was widely recognised throughout his lifetime, both in the US and abroad. Among other commendations he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the International Man Booker Prize, twice the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.Philip Roth died on 22 May 2018 at the age of eighty-five having retired from writing six years previously.Trade ReviewThe most scandalous book of the year and probably the decade. -- John Sutherland * The Times *The most outrageously funny book about sex yet written * Guardian *A hysterically funny monologue which has already added a new prototype to American literature... Anyone who can recall anything of the awesome mystery and humiliating farce of growing up will find this book compulsive reading. And it is blessedly, extremely funny * Spectator *Philip Roth's gift for fantasy, his superb dialogue, his ability to evoke places and atmospheres, make Portnoy's Complaint at once hilariously, scabrously funny and deeply moving * Financial Times *Alexander Portnoy is a great comic character. He is going to be for many readers what his mother was for him: The Most Unforgettable Character I've Met * New Statesman *

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Book Synopsis'This is a vicious, furious book, unapologetically not of this age - it is also horribly funny and unflinchingly honest' New Statesman David Kepesh, white-haired, and now in his sixties, is an eminent cultural critic on NPR radio and a formidable lecturer at a New York college. For years he's been casually, almost habitually, sleeping with the more spirited of his female students, though with an aesthete's critical distance. But now he's met Consuela Castillo, a twenty-four-year-old Cuban student of such head-turning beauty, that Kapesh finds himself dragged helplessly into a quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. The Dying Animal is a virtuoso performance from Philip Roth, following Kapesh through the tumult of erotic lust and the search for freedom, shackled by a mortal human body.Trade ReviewBrief and brilliant -- Frank Kermode * London Review of Books *A small disturbing masterpiece * New York Review of Books *A fierce, compacted, sometimes brutal meditation on the passing of time and the meaning of freedom * Daily Telegraph *Written with Roth's familiar elegance and composure * Sunday Times *Intense and brilliant... Dazzling and compelling * Sunday Herald *

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Book SynopsisPhilip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus a collection of stories, and a novella for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy's Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of America's finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave Trade ReviewScabrous, gutsy and scathing * The Times *Obscenely outrageous and yet brilliantly reflective of a paranoid reality that has become universal. It is the best of Roth, a kind of coda to all his fiction so far -- Harold Bloom * New York Times Book Review *This fitting capstone to Roth's Zuckerman trilogy proves that no one now writing can be funnier and more passionately serious than Philip Roth * The Times *A black fable about the lies and fictions which are the life blood of both politics and literature * Sunday Times *

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Book SynopsisFollowing the wild success of his novel, Carnovsky, Nathan Zuckerman has been catapulted into the literary limelight. As he ventures out onto the streets of Manhattan he finds himself accosted on all sides, the target of admonishers, advisers, would-be literary critics, and worst of all fans.An incompetent celebrity, ill at ease with his newfound fame, and unsure of how to live up to his fictional creation's notoriety, Zuckerman flounders his way through a high-profile affair, the disintegration of his family life, and fends off the attentions of his most tenacious fan yet, as the turbulent decade of the sixties draws to a close around him.But beneath the uneasy glamour are the spectres of the recently murdered Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and an unsettled Zuckerman feels himself watchedTrade ReviewElegant and furious... Witty, tender and brutal in a single paragraph -- Melvyn BraggIt is a) funny, b) sparkling prose, c) to-the-point short, d) genuinely moving. * Financial Times *A comic stroll in a hall of mirrors * Newsweek *Masterful * New York Times Book Review *It was bold of Roth to write a novel about being famous...a comic stroll in the hall of mirrors * Newsweek *

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Book SynopsisWhen talented young writer Nathan Zuckerman makes his pilgrimage to sit at the feet of his hero, the reclusive master of American Literature, E. I. Lonoff, he soon finds himself enmeshed in the great Jewish writer''s domestic life, with all its complexity, artifice and drive for artistic truth.As Nathan sits in breathlessly awkward conversation with his idol, a glimpse of a dark-haired beauty through a closing doorway leaves him reeling. He soon learns that the entrancing vision is Amy Bellette, but her position in the Lonoff household - student? mistress? - remains tantalisingly unclear. Over a disturbed and confusing dinner, Nathan gleans snippets of Amy's haunting Jewish background, and begins to draw his own fantastical conclusionsTrade ReviewRoth's best novel yet * London Review of Books *I had only to read the two opening sentences to realize that I was once again in the hands of a superbly endowed storyteller * New York Review of Books *Further evidence that Roth can do practically anything with fiction. His narrative power - the ability to delight the reader simultaneously with the telling and the tale - is superb * Washington Post *His prose is immaculate yet curiously plain and unostentatious, as natural as brething -- Al Alvarez

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Book Synopsis''He captures better than anyone the collision of public and private, the intrusion of history into the skin, the pores of every individual alive'' Guardian''Though on the morning after the election disbelief prevailed, especially among the pollsters, by the next everybody seemed to understand everything...''When celebrity aviator, Charles A. Lindbergh, wins the 1940 presidential election on the slogan of ''America First'', fear invades every Jewish household. Not only has Lindbergh blamed the Jews for pushing America towards war with Germany, he has negotiated an ''understanding'' with the Nazis promising peace between the two nations.Growing up in the ''ghetto'' of Newark, Philip Roth recounts his childhood caught in the stranglehold of this counterfactual nightmare. As America sinks into its own dark metamorphosis and Jewish families are torn apart, fear and uncertainty spread.Who really is President Lindbergh?AnTrade ReviewIt’s one of the great political novels for its depiction of how alterations in power affect ordinary men and women, and how obedience brings disaster. -- Linda Grant * New Statesman *In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, Roth precisely described the sinister and chilling nightmare in which the United States now finds itself… America has not read enough of Philip Roth -- Bernard-Henri Lévy * New Statesman *A dark, humane masterpiece, Roth is at the peak of his powers * The Times *Another frighteningly intense performance * Sunday Telegraph *The word genius doesn't seem excessive... The Plot Against America creates its reality magisterially, in long, fluid sentences that carry you beyond scepticism * Guardian *Untouchable...he is bequeathing us a body of work that adds up to the most accomplished dissection of American political, social and personal mores * Observer *Magnificent. Roth is writing the best books of his life. He captures better than anyone the collision of public and private, the intrusion of history into the skin, the pores of every individual alive * Guardian *Subtle, persuasive and unsettling. A brilliantly troubling and heartening novel * Sunday Times *Many passages in The Plot Against America echo feelings voiced today by vulnerable Americans – immigrants and minorities as alarmed by Trump’s election as the Jews of Newark are frightened by Lindbergh’s * New Yorker *Dazzling. The most exciting novelist writing today * Independent on Sunday *The novel is full of his usual furious cackling; tragedy tipping into comedy and comedy into tragedy within the space of a few sentences. The prose is beautiful * Mail on Sunday *A sensation * Sunday Times *A polemical classic * Esquire *Brilliant * Metro *One of the best writers of dialogue in the history of inverted commas * The Times *A reverberating celebration of family, community and humanity * Sunday Times *

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Book SynopsisWinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for FictionThe Counterlife is about people living their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter their destinies. Wherever they find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted by the prospect of an alternative existence. Illuminating these lives in free-fall and transformation is the acrobat mind of novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the sceptical, enveloping intelligence that calculates the price that''s paid in the struggle to change personal fortune and reshape history, whether in a dentist''s office in suburban New Jersey; a tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire; a church in London''s West End; or in a tiny desert settlement in Israel''s occupied West Bank. Shot through with head-turning dualities, as daring as it is moving, The Counterlife reinvents the novel with style, wit and grace.Trade ReviewRoth is a comic genius... In this book (wonderfully sharp, worryingly intense) he is an electrifier -- Martin AmisUnquestionably his masterpiece -- John BanvilleBoisterously serious, dense, fizzing and formally audacious... The final thing that needs to be said about The Counterlife...is that it's fucking funny -- Julian Barnes * London Review of Books *No other writer combines such a surface of colloquial relaxation with such a dense load of mediating intelligence - Roth has never written more scrupulously or, in spots, more lovingly -- John Updike * New Yorker *Magnificent...splendid... I hope The Counterlife felt, as Mr. Roth wrote it, like a triumph, because that is certainly how it reads to me * New York Times Book Review *

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Book SynopsisWinner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for FictionEveryman is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret and stoicism.The novel takes its title from a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death.The fate of Roth''s everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age when he is stalked with physical woes.The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.Trade ReviewA human story for our times -- A.S. ByattShimmers with the mysteries and regrets of a whole life...poignant, droll, and eloquent * Daily Telegraph *Capable of altering the way you see the world * Observer *Alive with literary brilliance for all its deathly subject matter * Sunday Times *So compelling, so important * Guardian *

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Book SynopsisA fiction-within-a-fiction, My Life as a Man centres on the fraught marriage of Peter, a gifted young writer and Maureen Tarnopol, the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead becomes his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and powered by moral blackmail. And yet, the the couple''s relationship is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen''s death, Peter is still trying - and failing - to write his way free of it. Out of desperate inventions and scorching truths, acts of weakness and shocking cruelty, Philip Roth creates a fierce tragedy about a fatal impasse between a man and a woman.Trade ReviewBalefully powerful -- Martin Amis * New York Times *A very grand work...in invention, in perception...in coming to grips with the wild inconsistencies of life and art * New Yorker *Roth's best... No writer alive can sustain a full-length novel at as high a decibel level as Philip Roth' * Newsweek *A scalding, unique addition to the lasting literature about men and women * Newsday *

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Book SynopsisReturning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman - incontinent and impotent - comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Walking the streets he quickly makes several connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. In a rash moment, he offers to swap homes with a young couple. And from the moment he meets them, Zuckerman wants to exchange his solitude for the erotic allure of the young woman Jamie, who draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, and the play of heart and body.Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.Trade ReviewThere are few writers who write with such power of the loss of powers * Times Literary Supplement *If its subject embraces mortality, its sentences ring with vitality, and Roth reminds us why "the transforming exigencies of prose fiction" still matter even as the light begins to die * Mail on Sunday *Taken together the Zuckermam novels read as both a noisy New Jersey Kaddish for 50 years of American History and an extraordinary contemporary "Song of Myself" * New Statesman *At his best, Philip Roth constructs his novels from huge blocks of material, to produce an effect that is overpowering * Observer *Here is a noble revelation of the curel vulnerability of the body we live in without choice * Times Literary Supplement *

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Book SynopsisPhilip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus a collection of stories, and a novella for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy's Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of America's finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave Trade ReviewVivid, absorbing -- Hermione Lee * Independent *Extraordinarily touching * London Review of Books *A dazzling performance * New York Times *The Facts is a lively and serious version of a novelist's life * New York Review of Books *A fine account of the origin of Roth's fiction - Philip Roth continues to be the most vigorous and truthful of American writers * Newsday *

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Book SynopsisNow a major motion picture starring Sarah Gadon, Logan Lerman and Ben Rosenfield, and adapted for the screen by James SchamusDuring the second year of the Korean War in 1951, studious, law-abiding Marcus Messner is beginning his sophomore year on the conservative campus of Ohio''s Winesburg College. Marcus has fled from his hometown of Newark, New jersey, trying to escape his father''s oppressive love - a love that is also a mad fear of the dangers of adult life soon to face his son. Whilst at college, Marcus has to traverse an American world that isn''t his own: facing off against ardent Christian, Dean Cauldwell, and falling in love with the beautiful Olivia Hutton. Indignation gleams with narrative muscle, as it twists and turns unpredictably, and extends - shockingly - beyond the confines of natural life.Trade ReviewIntricately wrought, passionate and fascinating... A late masterpiece * Financial Times *In Indignation, his power and intensity seem undiminished * New York Times *He is a writer of quite extraordinary skill and courage * London Review of Books *I relished Indignation. Roth writes with his trademark drive and fluency, on the knife blade between rage and laughter * Guardian *Roth reasserts his fictional mastery with a fine taut narrative about the frustrations of youth...every part of it is dovetailed into a story of compelling economy...a mid-20th-century tale of nemesis with all the intellectual and imaginative force of a great novelist writing at the height of his powers * Sunday Times *

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Book SynopsisSimon Axler is one of America''s leading classical stage actors, but his talent - his magic - has deserted him. All the spontaneity and unthinking impulsiveness that made him great has been replaced by a paralysing self-consciousness. Overwhelmed, Axler''s wife promptly leaves him, and Axler checks into a psychiatric hospital. It is only when he begins an affair with Pegeen - formerly a lesbian of 17 years - that Axler''s regeneration (and then his final catastrophe) can begin.Trade ReviewA literary colossus, whose ability to inspire, astonish and enrage his readers is undiminished' * Washington Post *There is a clarity, almost a ruthlessness, to his work, which makes the experience of reading any of his books a bracing, wild ride... He is the last of the giants * The Times *Roth...knows no limits, which is part of the fun of reading him * New Stateman *While the other big beasts of his literary generation lost it one by one, Roth has enjoyed a flowering of late form barely seen since Yeats. * Literary Review *Roth is no longer a novelist of comic exuberance, but of thoughtful meditation about life and increasingly death; he is our surviving laureate of lateness. His new work will not detain you long, but it will linger * Telegraph *

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Book Synopsis''A work of near heroic vitality and cunning'' Sunday TelegraphAt sixty-four Mickey Sabbath is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous; sex is an obsession and a principle, an instrument of perpetual misrule in his daily existence. But after the death of his long-time mistress - an erotic free spirit whose great taste for the impermissible matches his own - Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, tormented by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction...Winner of the National Book Award for FictionTrade ReviewA post-war American masterpiece * Daily Telegraph *This is a wickedly splendid book -- Frank KermodeIn time this will be seen as Roth's best novel * Guardian *For me, the book of the year - maybe the decade - is Sabbath's Theater...funny...moving, imaginative, deep... A masterpiece * Times Literary Supplement *Sabbath explodes some mad genie out of his bottle... Sabbath's Theater has more firestorming prose than any other novel I have read this year * Observer *

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Book SynopsisPhilip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus a collection of stories, and a novella for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy's Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of America's finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave voice to the complexities of the American experience in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. Roth's lasting contribution to literature was widely recognised throughout his lifetime, both in the US and abroad. Among other commendations he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the International Man Booker Prize, twice the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.Philip Roth died on 22 May 2018 at the age of eighty-five having retired from writing six years previously.Trade ReviewMarvellous... Raging and elegaic * Guardian *Full of insight, full of sharp ironic twists, full of wisdom about American idealism, and full of terrific fun... A profound and personal meditation on the changes in the American psyche over the last fifty years * Financial Times *A tragedy of classical proportions...a magnificent novel * The Times *Wonderful, rich...entirely gripping * Sunday Telegraph *A momentous novel * Observer *

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Book Synopsis''This swift, elegant, disturbing novel...stands at the extreme of contemporary fiction'' New York Times Book ReviewHe is a middle-aged American writer called Philip; she is an articulate, well-educated Englishwoman trapped in a loveless and humiliating marriage. In Philip''s London studio, this play of voices - sharp, tender and inquiring - reveals both their past lives with startling clarity. Deception is fiendishly clever, as it dances with the conventions of the novel, and redefines the boundaries between fiction and reality.Trade ReviewThis swift, elegant, disturbing novel...stands at the extreme of contemporary fiction * New York Times Book Review *Deception is itself deceptive, as elegant and ingenious as anything in The Ghost Writer or The Prague Orgy * New Republic *Lively, shiny, glazed with wit -- James Wood * Guardian *An amazing feast... He's invented the purest speech, the most convincing cadences, of any American novelist * Hudson Review *A fiendishly clever piece of work...an amazing feat... He's invented the purest speech, the most convincing cadences, of any American novelist * Hudson Review *

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Book SynopsisThe Ruppert Mundys, once the greatest baseball team in America, are now in a terminal decline, their line-up filled with a disreputable assortment of old men, drunks and even amputees. Around them baseball itself seems to be collapsing, brought down by a bizarre mixture of criminality, stupidity, and The Great Communist Conspiracy, aimed at the very heart of the American way of life.In this hilarious and wonderfully eccentric novel Philip Roth turns his attention to one of the most beloved of all American rituals: baseball. Players, tycoons and the paying public are all targets as Roth satirises the dense tapestry of myths and legends that have grown up around The Great American Pastime.Trade ReviewShameless comic extravagance' * New York Times *Roth invents baseball anew, as pure slapstick... An awesome performance * New Republic *Roth is one of a handful of living American novelists who can be called great * Washington Post *Roth is better than he's ever been before... The prose is electric * Atlantic *

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Book SynopsisPatrimony is a true story about the relationship between a father and a son.Philip Roth watches as his eight-six-year-old father, famous for his vigour, his charm and his skill as a raconteur - lovingly called 'the Bard of Newark' - battles with the brain tumour that will kill him.Trade ReviewNobody writes about the American family with more tenderness and honesty * New Statesman *A simple, moving, generous work * Independent on Sunday *The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away - with words. But the Lord giveth back, miraculously, in the form of this book and this family history * Guardian *A true story, told with all the powerful authority and cunning narrative order of a major writer * Sunday Times *His best work since The Counterlife * Observer *

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Book SynopsisWINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral and “our most accomplished novelist” (The New Yorker) turns his attention to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality. The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes. The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.

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Book SynopsisThe unforgettable story of an affair between a star lecturer at a New York college and the beautiful daughter of Cuban exiles—and the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss that ensues—from the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral. “[A] disturbing masterpiece.” —The New York Review of BooksNo matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you’re not superior to sex. With these words our most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college—as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete’s critical distance. But now that

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Book SynopsisNATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral delivers “a master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled modern moment (The Wall Street Journal).One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century 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 aging 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 truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, magnificently interwoven with the larger public history of modern America.

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Book SynopsisNATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From the Pulitzer Prize–winnning writer of explosive wit, merciless insight, and a fierce compassion comes a masterpiece (Newsweek) that illuminates the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora. Roth''s award-winning first book instantly established its author''s reputation. Goodbye, Columbus is 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. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender.

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Book SynopsisFrom the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral—“a lithe comic masterpiece” (Newsweek) consisting of notebook entries from one of his best-loved characters, Nathan Zuckerman. In quest of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, the American novelist Nathan Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s. There, in a nation straightjacketed by totalitarian Communism, he discovers a literary predicament, marked by institutionalized oppression, that is rather different from his own. He also discovers, among the oppressed writers with whom he quickly becomes embroiled in a series of bizarre and poignant adventures, an appealingly perverse kind of heroism.The Prague Orgy completes the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman bound. It provides a startling ending to Roth's intricately designed magnum opus on the unforeseen consequences of art.

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Book SynopsisFrom the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral—a richly imagined novel featuring America’s only homeless big-league baseball team in history delivers “shameless comic extravagance…. Roth gleefully exploits our readiness to let baseball stand for America itself (The New York Times). Gil Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire. The ex-con first baseman, John Baal, The Babe Ruth of the Big House, who never hit a home run sober. If you've never heard of them—or of the homeless baseball team the Ruppert Mundys—it's because of the Communist plot, and the capitalist scandal, that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory.In this ribald, wickedly satiric novel, Roth turns baseball's status as national pastime and myth into an occasion for unfettered picaresque farce, replete with heroism and perfidy, ebullient wordplay and a cast of characters that includes th

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Book SynopsisA dazzling novel about a man and woman married to other people—and the riveting conversations that take place before and after they make love—from the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral. This swift, elegant, disturbing novel...stands at the extreme of contemporary fiction. —The New York Times Book Review With the lover everyday life recedes, Roth writes—and exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, he presents in Deception the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction. At the center of Deception are two adulterers in their hiding place. He is a middle-aged American writer named Philip, living in London, and she is an articulate, intelligent, well-educated Englishwoman compromised by a humiliating marriage to which, in her thirties, she is already nervously half-resigned. The book's action c

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Book SynopsisNATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral delivers his richest, most rewarding novel (The New York Times Book Review) about Micky Sabbath, a scandalous hero who embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Once an 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 adulterous daring surpassed even his own—Sabbath, bereft and grieving and besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.

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Book SynopsisFor the last half century, the novels of Philip Roth have re-energized American fiction and redefined its possibilities, leading the critic Harold Bloom to proclaim Roth ?our foremost novelist since Faulkner.? Roth?s comic genius, his imaginative daring, his courage in exploring uncomfortable truths, and his assault on political, cultural, and sexual orthodoxies have made him one of the essential writers of our time. By special arrangement with the author, The Library of America continues the definitive edition of Roth?s collected works. This fifth volume of The Library of America?s definitive edition of Philip Roth?s collected works presents four books that exemplify the description of Roth, proposed by British novelist Anthony Burgess, as a writer ?who never steps twice into the same river.? The Counterlife (1986) is a novel told from conflicting perspectives about people enacting drastic dreams of renewal and escape. The Facts (1988)?the first of the ?Roth Books??is a novelist?s autobiography in which the author presents his own battles defictionalized and unadorned. In the second Roth book, Deception (1990), a married American named Philip, living in London, and the married Englishwoman who is his mistress meet sporadically in a secret trysting place where the woman eloquently reveals herself to her lover as they talk before and after making love. In the third Roth book, Patrimony (1991), the author watches as his 86-year-old father, Herman Roth, battles a fatal brain tumor.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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Book SynopsisThe Library of America''s definitive edition of Philip Roth''s collected works continues with two novels that heralded the beginning of a more than decade-long creative explosion-one remarkable in an older writer and hailed by critics as unparalleled in American literary history. In the diabolically imaginative Operation Shylock (1993), a character named Philip Roth encounters a look-alike who claims Roth''s identity and who tours Israel promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews-proselytizing the "real" Roth is intent on stopping, even if it means impersonating his impersonator. "This splendidly wicked book" is how the critic Frank Kermode described Sabbath''s Theater (1995), a comic masterpiece of epic proportions whose gargantuan hero, Mickey Sabbath, grieving the loss of his unsurpassable mistress, embarks on a turbulent journey into his past besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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Book SynopsisThe 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 expertly seduces a beautiful twenty-four-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles only to find himself torn by sexual jealousy and the anguish of loss. As The Plot Against America (2004) begins, aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh has defeated Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, and fear invades every Jewish household in America. Lindbergh has publicly blamed the Jews for pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, and now in office, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler. What follows for Jews during the Lindbergh presidency—most particularly in the Newark household of the boy Philip Roth—is the subject of an extraordinary work of historical imagination. With Exit Ghost (2007) Roth rings down the curtain on perhaps his greatest literary creation. Nathan Zuckerman returns to a radically changed New York, the city he left eleven years before, where a rash decision draws him into a vivid drama rife with implications for his future, and his past.Philip Roth is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by The Library of America. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the National Medal of Arts, and the Gold Medal in Fiction, the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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Book SynopsisWhat 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 America’s definitive edition of Philip Roth’s collected works. Everyman (2006) is the sparse and affecting story of one man’s lifelong skirmish with mortality. Set against the backdrop of the Korean War, Indignation (2008) is the extraordinary narrative of a young man struggling against the conformity of McCarthy-era America and his father’s overwhelming fear. In The Humbling (2009), aging actor Simon Axler embarks on a risky and aberrant affair in a desperate attempt to recoup his lost artistic gifts. And in Nemesis (2010), Roth offers an exacting portrait of the emotions—fear and anger, bewilderment and grief—bred by a polio epidemic in Newark in the summer of 1944.Philip Roth is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by The Library of America. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the National Medal of Arts, and the Gold Medal in Fiction, the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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Book SynopsisPhilip Roth returns with a definitive edition of his essential statements on literature, his controversial novels, and the writing life.

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Book Synopsis“Until the day of Merriwether’s departure from the house—a month after his divorce—the Merriwether family looked like an ideally tranquil one” we read on the first page of Other Men’s Daughters. It is the late 1960s, and the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, are full of long-haired hippies decked out in colorful garb, but Dr. Robert Merriwether, who teaches at Harvard and has been married for a good long time, hardly takes note. Learned, curious, thoughtful, and a creature of habit, Merriwether is anything but an impulsive man, and yet over the summer, while Sarah, his wife, is away on vacation, he meets a summer student, Cynthia Ryder, and before long the two have fallen into bed and in love. Richard Stern’s novel is an elegant and unnerving examination of just how cold and destructive a thing love, “the origin of so much story and disorder,” can be.

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