Description
Book SynopsisThis "landmark of the American literary century" (
Boston Globe) is finally published as one volume, appearing with a brilliant new introduction.
Trade Review"The Ur-novel at the heart of American literature—
Mercy of a Rude Stream is a towering astonishment." -- Junot Diaz
"Henry Roth has only two peers in American-English Jewish fiction, Nathanael West and Philip Roth." -- Harold Bloom
"As provocative as anything in the chapters of St. Augustine or Rousseau." -- Stefan Kanfer - Los Angeles Times Book Review
"The literary comeback of the century." -- Jonathan Rosen - Vanity Fair
"[
Mercy of a Rude Stream] is like hearing that Ralph Ellison is publishing a new novel forty-two years after
Invisible Man or J. D. Salinger is preparing a sequel to
The Catcher in the Rye." -- Leonard Michaels - New York Times Book Review
"The publication of the complete
Mercy of a Rude Stream is an opportunity to appreciate how sublimely strange Roth’s masterpiece is. 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." -- Nathaniel Rich - The New York Review of Books
