Search results for ""Author Philip Roth""
Vintage Publishing The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography
How does a novelist write about the facts of his life after spending years fictionalising those facts with irrepressible daring and originality?What becomes of 'the facts' after they have been smelted down for art's sake? In The Facts - Philip Roth's idiosyncratic autobiography - we find out. Focusing on five episodes in his life, Roth gives a portrait of his secure city childhood in Newark, through to his first marriage, clashes with the Jewish establishment over Goodbye, Columbus and his writing of Portnoy's Complaint. In true Rothian style, his fictional self Nathan Zuckerman is allowed the final, coruscating word of reply.
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Random House USA Inc Operation Shylock: A Confession (PEN/Faulkner Award)
£12.95
Vintage Publishing Patrimony: A True Story
Patrimony 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. The son, full of love, anxiety and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father's long engagement with life. Written with fierce tenderness, Patrimony is a classic work of memoir by a master storyteller.
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Vintage Publishing Deception
'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.
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Vintage Publishing Exit Ghost
Returning 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.
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Vintage Publishing Portnoy's Complaint
'The most outrageously funny book about sex written' GuardianPortnoy'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.Portnoy's Complaint tells the tale of young Jewish lawyer Alexander Portnoy and his scandalous sexual confessions to his psychiatrist. As narrated by Portnoy, he takes the reader on a journey through his childhood to adolescence to present day while articulating his sexual desire, frustration and neurosis in shockingly candid ways. Hysterically funny and daringly intimate, Portnoy's Complaint was an immediate bestseller upon its publication and elevated Roth to an international literary celebrity.
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Vintage Publishing The Human Stain
'An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand'- Sunday TelegraphPhilip Roth's brilliant conclusion to his eloquent trilogy of post-war America - a magnificent successor to American Pastoral and I Married a CommunistIt 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, the persecution needless, but the truth about Silk would astonish 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 comes upon Silk's secret, and sets out to unearth his former buried life, piecing the biographical fragments back together. This is against backdrop of seismic shifts in American history, which take on real, human urgency as Zuckerman discovers more and more about Silk's past and his futile search for renewal and regeneration.________________PRAISE FOR THE HUMAN STAIN:'One of the most beautiful books I've ever read' Red'[A] tender, shocking and incendiary story on the failure of the American dream refracted through the prism of race' Guardian'A masterpiece' Mail on Sunday
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Vintage Publishing I Married a Communist
The second novel of Roth’s eloquent American trilogy, set in the tempestuous McCarthy era - a brilliant successor to American PastoralI Married a Communist charts the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, an American roughneck who begins life as a ditchdigger in 1930s New Jersey, becoming a big-time radio hotshot in the 1940s. In his heyday as a star - and as a zealous, bullying supporter of 'progressive' political causes - Ira marries Hollywood's beloved leading lady, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon is short-lived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling expose that identifies Ira as 'an American taking his orders from Moscow'. In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and savage revenge, anti-Communist fever pollutes national politics and infects the relationships of ordinary Americans; friends become deadly enemies, parents and children tragically estranged, lovers blacklisted and felled from vertiginous heights.‘Quintessential Philip Roth’ Sunday Telegraph
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Gallimard Le rabaissement
£11.45
Vintage Publishing American Pastoral: The renowned Pulitzer Prize-Winning novel
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZEPhilip Roth’s masterpiece provides a piercing look into the promises of prosperity, civic order and domesticity in twentieth century America ‘Swede’ Levov is living the American dream. He glides through life cocooned by his devoted family, his demanding yet highly rewarding (and lucrative) business, his sporting prowess, his good looks. He is the embodiment of thriving, post-war America, land of liberty and hope. Until the sunny day in 1968, when the Swede’s bountiful American luck deserts him.The tragedy springs from devastatingly close to home. His adored daughter, Merry, has become a stranger to him, a fanatical teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism that plunges the Levov family into the political mayhem of sixties America, and drags them into the underbelly of a seemingly ascendant society. Rendered powerless by the shocking turn of events, the Swede can only watch as his pastoral idyll is methodically torn apart. Extraordinarily nuanced and poignant, American Pastoral is the first in an eloquent trilogy of post-war American novels and cemented Roth’s reputation as one of the greatest American novelists of the twentieth century.‘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
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Vintage Publishing Indignation
Now 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.
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Vintage Publishing The Anatomy Lesson
'The Anatomy Lesson is a ferocious, heartfelt book - lavish with laughs and flamboyant inventions' John UpdikeWith his fortieth birthday receding into the distance, along with his hairline and his most successful novel, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious affliction – pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman, whose work was his life, finds himself physically unable to write a line. He treks from one doctor to another, but none can find a cause for the pain and nobody can assuage it. Could it be, he wonders to himself, that the cause of the pain is nothing less than the books he has written?As he grapples with this possibility, he tries an onslaught of painkillers, then vodka, and finally marijuana. He contemplates threatening the pain with suicide, attempting to scare it out of his system. He toys with the prospect of a dramatic career change. What will it take for the pain to finally leave him alone?
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Vintage Publishing The Ghost Writer
When 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 conclusions…
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Vintage Publishing Sabbath's Theater
'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 Fiction
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Vintage Publishing Everyman
Winner 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.
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Vintage Publishing Zuckerman Unbound
Following 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 watched…
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Vintage Publishing American Pastoral
'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' Tatler
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Vintage Publishing Goodbye, Columbus
Philip Roth’s debut novella and Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction 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 and fall 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 - sometimes iconoclastic, sometimes elegiac - that crackle with irreverent originality and display Roth's blazing early talent. Philip Roth's prize-winning first book instantly established its author's reputation as a writer of explosive wit, merciless insight and humane compassion for even the most self-deluding of his characters.‘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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Vintage Publishing The Plot Against America
'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?And to what end has he hijacked America?__________________________'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**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**
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Vintage Publishing The Breast
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 monstrous cockroach, the narrator of Philip Roth's fantasy has become a 155-pound female breast. What follows is a deliriously funny yet moving exploration of the full implications of Kepesh's metamorphosis; audacious, heretical - as darkly hilarious as it is existentially unnerving - making new the silliness, triviality and wonderful meaninglessness of lived human experience.
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Gallimard La bete qui meurt
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Vintage Publishing The Human Stain
The 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 Telegraph
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Vintage Publishing The Great American Novel
The 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.
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Vintage Publishing Nemesis
It'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. As polio begins to ravage Bucky's playground - child by helpless child - Roth leads us through every emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering and the pain. 'The genius of Philip Roth...back at his imperious best in this heartbreaking tale... The eloquence of Roth's storytelling makes Nemesis one of his most haunting works' Daily Mail 'Cantor is one of Roth's best creations and the atmosphere of terror is masterfully fashioned' Sunday Telegraph 'Very fine, very unsettling' Douglas Kennedy, The Times
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Vintage Publishing The Humbling
Simon 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.
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Vintage Publishing My Life as a Man
A 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.
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Vintage Publishing When She Was Good
When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her irresponsible, alcoholic father thrown in jail. Since then, Lucy has become a furious adolescent - raging against middle-class life and provincial American piety - intent on reforming the men around her: especially her incompetent mama's boy of a husband, Roy. As time rolls on, Lucy struggles to free herself of the terrible disappointment engendered by her father, and is forever yearning for the man he could never be. It is with scalpel-like precision that Roth depicts the rage, the hatred and the ferocity of feeling that soon takes hold of Lucy's life.
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Vintage Publishing The Counterlife
Winner 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.
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Vintage Publishing The Prague Orgy
In search of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, 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 an institutionalised oppression that is rather different from his own. He also discovers, among the subjugated writers with whom he quickly becomes embroiled in a series of bizarre and poignant adventures, an appealingly perverse kind of heroism. The Prague Orgy, consisting of entries from Zuckerman's notebooks recording his sojourn among these outcast artists, 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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Vintage Publishing The Dying Animal
'This is a vicious, furious book, unapologetically not of this age - it is also horribly funny and unflinchingly honest' New StatesmanDavid 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.
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Vintage Publishing Our Gang: Starring Trick and His Friends
'Disturbing, logical and very funny... In short, a masterpiece' New York Times Book ReviewA ferocious political satire in the great tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, Our Gang is Philip Roth's brilliantly acerbic response to the phenomenon of Richard M. Nixon.In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth portrays an American president who outdoes the severest cynic; a peace-loving Quaker and believer in the sanctity of human life who doesn't have a problem with killing unarmed women and children. A master politician with an honest sneer, he finds himself battling the Boy Scouts, declaring war on pro-pornography Denmark, all the time trusting in the basic indifference of the voting public.Tricky is the unprincipled self-seeker who hides his heartlessness behind the anaesthetising clichés of high office, whose public language is a merciless parody of that 'candid' Presidential prose which is merely double-talk, or as Orwell put it, 'pure wind'.
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Vintage Publishing The Professor of Desire
As 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. As Philip Roth follows Kapesh from the domesticity of childhood out into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a ménage à trois in London to the depths of loneliness in New York, Kapesh confronts the central dilemma of pleasure: how to make a truce between dignity and desire; and how to survive the ordeal of an unhallowed existence.
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Vintage Publishing Operation Shylock: A Confession
'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.
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Daunt Books Mendelssohn Is On The Roof
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The New York Review of Books, Inc Other Men's Daughters
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Simon & Schuster Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety
For years, Daniel Smith suffered from bouts of acute anxiety, extended episodes without any apparent cause that seized control of his body and mind, leaving him an emotional wreck. Sleep was impossible and headaches and nausea haunted his days. Anxiety threatened his sanity and jeopardized his relationships. He had a prestigious job, a comfortable apartment, and caring friends-but, according to his therapists, nothing seemed to be wrong. Now in paperback, Monkey Mindis the story of how one man finally learned to live with-and laugh at-his own anxiety issues. Smith shares his own hilarious and heart-wrenching story from his first severe episode at age sixteen to his discovery of the author Philip Roth, who made anxiety seem noble, to his first job, which nearly drove him to distraction, to his struggle to give up the endless cycle of hand-wringing angst in order to keep the love of his life. Through medication, endless psychoanalysis, self-imposed isolation, and meditation, Smith finally makes peace with his restless mind and becomes the husband and father he longs to be. Whether you suffer from clinical anxiety or an overdose of modern life in our "Age of Anxiety," Monkey Mind's combination of wit, candour, and serious advice will help you live in the moment instead of inside your own head.
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