Description
Book Synopsis'A landmark of the American literary century' Boston Globe
Sixty years after the publication of his great modernist masterpiece, Call It Sleep, Henry Roth returned with Mercy of a Rude Stream - a sequence of four internationally-acclaimed epic novels of immigrant life in early-twentieth century New York.
The second novel in the internationally acclaimed six-volume sequence which began with MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM. Ira Stigman, now an adolescent in 1920s New York, is on the rack. All his friends seem to be paragons of achievement and sophistication, while his own life bears the taint of an impoverished immigrant background. Work on the trolleycars and selling soda at Yankee Stadium introduces him to an underworld of corruption and petty thieving, and all his choices seem to be the wrong ones. Worst of all, within his own family exists a temptation so dark that it has corroded Ira's very soul. A DIVING ROCK ON THE HUDSON is fearless in its depiction of a young man in the lower depths, yet in its glimpses of redemption it offers hope with the power of literature as a force for comprehension and forgiveness.
'The literary comeback of the century' Vanity Fair
'As unquenchably vibrant with life as the immigrants whose existence it commemorates' Sunday Times
'A dynamic and moving event . . . a stirring portrait of a vanished culture . . . a poignant chapter in the life-drama of a unique American writer' Newsweek
'Although it is sixty years since a new novel by Mr Roth last hit the bookshelves, it has been worth the wait' The Economist
'Fresh and touching' Wall Street Journal
'A precision of detail which brings the sounds from the tenements, the heat of the sidewalk steaming off the pages' Sunday Express
'A meticulous evocation of a now-distant episode of the American experience' New York Times Book Review
Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Complete Novels includes
1) A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park
2) A Diving Rock on the Hudson
3) From Bondage
4) Requiem for Harlem.
Trade ReviewThe Ur-novel at the heart of American literature -
Mercy of a Rude Stream is a towering achievement -- Junot Diaz
Henry Roth has only two peers in American-English Jewish fiction, Nathanael West and Philip Roth -- Harold Bloom
The literary comeback of the century * Vanity Fair *
A masterpiece ... It is not remotely like anything else in American literature.... It is this pitiless examination of a writer grappling with his demons, at the highest reaches of his intellectual capacity, that gives
Mercy of a Rude Stream its ferocious passion.... It is the exhilaration felt by a man who has cast off six decades of self-repression and finally feels himself free * The New York Review of Books *
Roth creates his own
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man--a marvelously poetic chronicle * Chicago Sun-Times *
Mr. Roth's innovative use of language is both beautiful and highly realistic ... Although there is no style called Rothian, there should be * New York Times Book Review *
This novel is as unquenchably vibrant with life as the immigrants whose existence it commemorates * Sunday Times *
A genuine publishing event ... unbeatable in [its] drama, tension and feeling * Literary Review *
