Philip Roth Books In Order

American Trilogy Books In Publication Order

  1. American Pastoral (1997)
  2. I Married a Communist (1998)
  3. The Human Stain (2000)

David Kepesh Books In Publication Order

  1. The Breast (1972)
  2. The Professor of Desire (1977)
  3. The Dying Animal (2001)

Nathan Zuckerman Books In Publication Order

  1. My Life as a Man (1974)
  2. The Ghost Writer (1979)
  3. Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
  4. The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
  5. The Prague Orgy (1985)
  6. Exit Ghost (2007)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Letting Go (1961)
  2. When She Was Good (1966)
  3. Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)
  4. Our Gang (1971)
  5. The Great American Novel (1973)
  6. The Counterlife (1986)
  7. Deception (1990)
  8. Patrimony (1991)
  9. Operation Shylock (1993)
  10. Sabbath’s Theater (1995)
  11. His Mistress’s Voice (1995)
  12. The Plot Against America (2004)
  13. Everyman (2006)
  14. Indignation (2008)
  15. The Humbling (2009)
  16. Nemesis (2010)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. The Conversion of the Jews (1958)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories (1959)
  2. A Philip Roth Reader (1980)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. Reading Myself and Others (1975)
  2. American West’s Acid Rain Test (1985)
  3. The Facts (1988)
  4. Shop Talk (2001)
  5. A Writer at Work (2011)
  6. Notes For My Biographer (2012)
  7. Why Write? (2017)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. New American Review 10 (1970)

American Trilogy Book Covers

David Kepesh Book Covers

Nathan Zuckerman Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

Philip Roth Books Overview

American Pastoral

As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century’s promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth’s protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father’s glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede’s beautiful American luck deserts him. For Swede’s adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longer for American Pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth’s masterpiece.

I Married a Communist

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, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s. In his heyday as a star and as a zealous, bullying supporter of ‘progressive’ political causes Ira marries Hollywood’s beloved silent film star, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon in her Manhattan townhouse is shortlived, however, and it is the publication of Eve’s scandalous bestselling expos that identifies him as ‘an American taking his orders from Moscow.’In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge spilling over into the public arena from their origins in Ira’s turbulent personal life, Philip Roth who Commonweal calls the ‘master chronicler of the American twentieth century has written a brilliant fictional protrayal of that treacherous postwar epoch when the anti Communist fever not only infected national politics but traumatized the intimate, innermost lives of friends and families, husbands and wives, parents and children.

The Human Stain

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 his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret. But it’s not the secret of his affair, at seventy one, with Faunia Farley, a woman half his age with a savagely wrecked past a part time farmhand and a janitor at the college where, until recently, he was the powerful dean of faculty. And it’s not the secret of Coleman’s alleged racism, which provoked the college witch hunt that cost him his job and, to his mind, killed his wife. Nor is it the secret of misogyny, despite the best efforts of his ambitious young colleague, Professor Delphine Roux, to expose him as a fiend. Coleman’s secret has been kept for fifty years: from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out to understand how this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, had fabricated his identity and how that cannily controlled life came unraveled. Set in 1990s America, where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions are made manifest through public denunciation and rituals of purification, The Human Stain concludes Philip Roth’s eloquent trilogy of postwar American lives that are as tragically determined by the nation’s fate as by the ‘human stain’ that so ineradicably marks human nature. This harrowing, deeply compassionate, and completely absorbing novel is a magnificent successor to his Vietnam era novel, American Pastoral, and his McCarthy era novel, I MARRIED A COMMUNIST.

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 giant beetle, the narrator of Philip Roth’s richly conceived fantasy has become a 155 pound female breast. What follows is a deliriously funny yet touching exploration of the full implications of Kepesh’s metamorphosis a daring, heretical book that brings us face to face with the intrinsic strangeness of sex and subjectivity.

The Professor of Desire

As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes. Little does he realize how prophetic this motto will be or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a m nage a trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a supremely intelligent, affecting, and often hilarious novel about the dilemma of pleasure: where we seek it; why we flee it; and how we struggle to make a truce between dignity and desire. Philip Roth is a great historian of modern eroticism…
. He speaks of a sexuality that questions itself; it is still hedonism, but it is problematic, wounded, ironic hedonism. His is the uncommon union of confession and irony. Infinitely vulnerable in his sincerity and infinitely elusive in his irony. Milan Kundera A thoughtful…
elegant novel…
. A fine display of literary skills. The New York Times Book Review

The Dying Animal

David Kepesh is white haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college, when he meets Consuela Castillo, a decorous, well mannered student of twenty four, the daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who promptly puts his life into erotic disorder. Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, when he left his wife and child, Kepesh has experimented with living what he calls an ’emancipated manhood,’ beyond the reach of family or a mate. Over the years he has refined that exuberant decade of protest and license into an orderly life in which he is both unimpeded in the world of eros and studiously devoted to his aesthetic pursuits. But the youth and beauty of Consuela, ‘a masterpiece of volupt ‘ undo him completely, and a maddening sexual possessiveness transports him to the depths of deforming jealousy. The carefree erotic adventure evolves, over eight years, into a story of grim loss. What is astonishing is how much of America’s post sixties sexual landscape is encompassed in The Dying Animal. Once again, with unmatched facility, Philip Roth entangles the fate of his characters with the social forces that shape our daily lives. And there is no character who can tell us more about the way we live with desire now than David Kepesh, whose previous incarnations as a sexual being were chronicled by Roth in THE BREAST and THE PROFESSOR OF DESIRE. A work of passionate immediacy as well as a striking exploration of attachment and freedom, The Dying Animal is intellectually bold, forcefully candid, wholly of our time, and utterly without precedent a story of sexual discovery told about himself by a man of seventy, a story about the power of eros and the fact of death.

My Life as a Man

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 wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it 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 cauterizing truths, acts of weakness, tenderheartedness, and shocking cruelty, Philip Roth creates a work worthy of Strindberg a fierce tragedy of sexual need and blindness.

The Ghost Writer

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 meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff’s and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Na*zi persecution. If she were, it might change his life…
The first volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The Ghost Writer is about the tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency and about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other.

Zuckerman Unbound

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 ‘Hey, you do all that stuff in that book?’, but he also finds himself the target of admonishers, advisers, and sidewalk literary critics. The recent murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., lead an unsettled Zuckerman to wonder if ‘target’ may be more than a figure of speech.

In Zuckerman Unbound the second volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound the notorious novelist Nathan Zuckerman retreats from his oldest friends, breaks his marriage to a virtuous woman, and damages, perhaps irreparably, his affectionate connection to his younger brother…
and all because of his great good fortune!

The Anatomy Lesson

At forty, 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, is unable to write a line. Now his work is trekking from one doctor to another, but none can find a cause for the pain and nobody can assuage it. Zuckerman himself wonders if the pain can have been caused by his own books. And while he is wondering, his dependence on painkillers grows into an addiction to vodka, mari*juana, and Percodan. The Anatomy Lesson is a great comedy of illness written in what the English critic Hermione Lee has described as ‘a manner at once…
brash and thoughtful…
lyrical and wry, which projects through comic expostulations and confessions…
a knowing, humane authority.’ The third volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The Anatomy Lesson provides some of the funniest scenes in all of Roth’s fiction as well as some of the fiercest. From the Trade Paperback edition.

The Prague Orgy

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, consisting of entries from protagonist Nathan 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. This Vintage edition is the first paperback publication of the epilogue.

Exit Ghost

Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age. Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post 9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body. The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman’s youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman s first literary hero, E. I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation. The third connection is with Lonoff s would be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff s great secret. 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. Haunted by Roth s earlier work The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer s insatiable commitment to fiction.

Letting Go

Letting Go is Philip Roth’s first full length novel, published just after Goodbye, Columbus, when he was twenty nine. Set in 1950s Chicago, New York, and Iowa City, Letting Go presents as brilliant a fictional portrait as we have of a mid century America defined by social and ethical constraints and by moral compulsions conspicuously different from those of today. Newly discharged from the Korean War army, reeling from his mother s recent death, freed from old attachments and hungrily seeking others, Gabe Wallach is drawn to Paul Herz, a fellow graduate student in literature, and to Libby, Paul s moody, intense wife. Gabe s desire to be connected to the ordered world of feeling that he finds in books is first tested vicariously by the anarchy of the Herzes struggles with responsible adulthood and then by his own eager love affairs. Driven by the desire to live seriously and act generously, Gabe meets an impassable test in the person of Martha Reganhart, a spirited, outspoken, divorced mother of two, a formidable woman who, according to critic James Atlas, is masterfully portrayed with depth and resonance. The complex liaison between Gabe and Martha and Gabe s moral enthusiasm for the trials of others are at the heart of this ambitious first novel. Roth has the finest eye for the details of American life since Sinclair Lewis. Stanley Edgar Hyman

When She Was Good

In this mesmerizing, funny, chilling novel, the setting is a small town in the 1940s Midwest, the subject the heart of a wounded and ferociously moralistic young woman, one of those implacable American moralists whose goodness is a terrible disease. When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With his unerring portraits of Lucy and her hapless, childlike husband, Roy, Roth has created an uncompromising work of fictional realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning, and discontent that is at once pitiless and compassionate.

Portnoy’s Complaint

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 are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient’s ‘morality,’ however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.’ Spielvogel, O. ‘The Puzzled Penis,’ Internationale Zeitschrift f r Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909. It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother child relationship. With a new Afterword by the author for the 25th Anniversary edition. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Our Gang

A ferocious political satire in the great tradition, ‘Our Gang‘ is Philip Roth’s brilliantly indignant response to the phenomenon of Richard M. Nixon. In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth show us a man 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 in self defence. A master politician with an honest sneer, he finds himself battling the Boy Scouts, declaring war on Pro Po*rnography Denmark, all the time trusting in the basic indifference of the voting public.

The Great American Novel

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 homerun sober. If you’ve never heard of them – or of the Ruppert Mundy’s, the only homeless big-league ball team in American history – it’s because of the Communist plot and the capitalist scandal that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory. In this ribald, richly imagined, and wickedly satiric novel, Philip Roth turns baseball’s status as national pastime and myth into the occasion for unfettered picaresque farce, replete with heroism, perfidy, ebullient wordplay, and a cast of characters that includes the House Un-American Activities Committee. ‘Roth is better than he’s ever been before…
. The prose is electric.’ – The Atlantic

The Counterlife

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 existence that can reverse their fate. Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book’s evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the miind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the skeptical, 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, or in a tradition bound English Village in Gloucestershire, or in a church in London’s West End, or in a tiny desert settlement in Israel’s occupied West Bank.

Deception

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 action consists of conversation mainly the lovers talking to each other before and after making love. That dialogue sharp, rich, playful, inquiring, moving, as Hermione Lee writes, on a scale of pain from furious bafflement to stoic gaiety is nearly all there is to this audiobook, and all there needs to be. A fiendishly clever piece of work…
an amazing feat…
. He’s invented the purest speech, the most convincing cadences, of any American novelist. William Pritchard, Hudson Review

Patrimony

Patrimony, a true story, touches the emotions as strongly as anything Philip Roth has ever written. Roth watches as his eighty six year old father famous for his vigor, charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections battles with the brain tumor 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, stubborn engagement with life.

Operation Shylock

Time Magazine Best American Novel 1993In this fiendishly imaginative book which may or may not be fiction, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring Israel, promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews. Roth is intent on stopping him, even if that means impersonating his own impersonator. With excruciating suspense, unfettered philosophical speculation, and a cast of characters that includes Israeli intelligence agents, Palestinian exiles, an accused war criminal, and an enticing charter member of an organization called Anti Semites Anonymous, Operation Shylock barrels across the frontier between fact and fiction, seriousness and high comedy, history and nightmare.

Sabbath’s Theater

AS MUCH AS AS HE WANTS TO BE THE MAQUIS DE SADE, HE IS NOT. AS MUCH AS HE WANTS TO BE SEVENTEEN, HE IS NOT. AS MUCH AS HE WANTS TO BE DEAD, HE IS NOT. He is Mickey Sabbath, the aging, raging powerhouse whose savage effrontery and mocking audacity are at the heart of Philip Roth’s bold and hilarious new novel. Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But, after the death of his long time mistress an exotic free spirit whose adulterous daring exceeds even his own Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, besieged by the ghosts of those who loved him most, he contrives a succession of madness and extinction. Sabbath’s Theatre is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is it’s gargantuan hero. Philip Roth, in his twenty first book, is at the very peak of his powers.

The Plot Against America

When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for sel& 64257;shly pushing America toward a pointless war with Na*zi Germany, but upon taking of& 64257;ce as the thirty third president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial understanding with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and virulent anti Semitic policies he appeared to accept without dif& 64257;culty. What then followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new book by Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family and for a million such families all over the country during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst.

Everyman

Philip Roth’s new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The best selling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from ‘one family’s harrowing encounter with history’ New York Times 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.A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely ex husband of three very different women with whom he’s made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has become what he does not want to be. The terrain of this powerful novel Roth’s twenty seventh book and the fifth to be published in the twenty first century is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all. Everyman takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth century allegorical play, a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death.

Indignation

Against the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life’s unimagined chances and terrifying consequences. 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 there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy. As the long suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father s fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world. Indignation, Philip Roth s twenty ninth book, is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage, and error. It is a story told with all the inventive energy and wit Roth has at his command, at once a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in his recent books and a powerful addition to his investigations of the impact of American history on the life of the vulnerable individual.

The Humbling

Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth’s startling new book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, are melted into air, into thin air. When he goes onstage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His confidence in his powers has drained away; he imagines people laughing at him; he can no longer pretend to be someone else. Something fundamental has vanished. His wife has gone, his audience has left him, his agent can t persuade him to make a comeback. Into this shattering account of inexplicable and terrifying self evacuation bursts a counterplot of unusual erotic desire, a consolation for a bereft life so risky and aberrant that it points not toward comfort and gratification but to a yet darker and more shocking end. In this long day s journey into night, told with Roth s inimitable urgency, bravura, and gravity, all the ways that we convince ourselves of our solidity, all our life s performances talent, love, sex, hope, energy, reputation are stripped off. Following the dark meditations on mortality and endings in Everyman and Exit Ghost, and the bitterly ironic retrospect on youth and chance in Indignation, Roth has written another in his haunting group of late novels.

Nemesis

In the ‘stifling heat of equatorial Newark,’ a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, lifelong disability, and even death. This is the startling theme of Philip Roth’s wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely knit, family oriented Newark community and its children. At the center of Nemesis is a vigorous, dutiful twenty three year old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges and disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor s dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground and on the everyday realities he faces Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering, and the pain. Moving between the smoldering, malodorous streets of besieged Newark and Indian Hill, a pristine children s summer camp high in the Poconos whose ‘mountain air was purified of all contaminants’ Roth depicts a decent, energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic. Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantor s passage into personal disaster, and no less exact about the condition of childhood. Through this story runs the dark questions that haunt all four of Roth s late short novels, Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and now Nemesis: What kind of accidental choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand the onslaught of circumstance?

Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories

Roth’s award winning first book instantly established its author’s reputation as a writer of explosive wit, merciless insight, and a fierce compassion for even the most self deluding of his characters. 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 and that illuminate the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora.

Reading Myself and Others

The interviews, essays, and articles collected here span a quarter 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. Here too are Roth’s writings on the Eastern European writers he has always championed; and on baseball, American fiction, and American Jews. The essential collection of nonfiction by a true American master, Reading Myself and Others features his long interview with the Paris Review.

The Facts

The Facts is the unconventional autobiography of a writer who has reshaped our idea of fiction a work of compelling candor and inventiveness, instructive particularly in its revelation of the interplay between life and art.

Philip Roth concentrates on five episodes from his life: his secure city childhood in the thirties and forties; his education in American life at a conventional college; his passionate entanglement, as an ambitious young man, with the angriest person he ever met the ‘girl of my dreams’ Roth calls her; his clash, as a fledgling writer, with a Jewish establishment outraged by Goodbye, Columbus; and his discovery, in the excesses of the sixties, of an unmined side to his talent that led him to write Portnoy’s Complaint.

The book concludes surprisingly in true Rothian fashion with a sustained assault by the novelist against his proficiencies as an autobiographer.

Shop Talk

In Philip Roth’s intimate intellectual encounters with an international and diverse cast of writers, they explore the importance of region, politics, and history in their work and trace the imaginative path by which a writer s highly individualized art is informed by the wider conditions of life. Milan Kundera and Czechoslovakia, Primo Levi and Auschwitz, Edna O Brien and Ireland, Aharon Appelfeld and Bukovina, Ivan Kl ma and Prague, Isaac Singer and Warsaw, Bruno Schulz and Poland what is the intricate transaction between the susceptible writer and the provocative time and place? Roth s questions go to the original conditions that stimulate the narrative impulse, and he puts them to writers who are as attuned to the subtleties of literature as to the influence of the surrounding society. Also included here are appreciative portraits of two of Roth s late friends, each transfixed till the end by his artistic vocation the writer Bernard Malamud and the painter Philip Guston as well as several cartoons drawn by Guston, a gift to Roth to illustrate his novella THE BREAST and printed here for the first time. Shop Talk concludes with Roth s essay Rereading Saul Bellow, a vivid presentation of Bellow s achievement and, in the spirit of this collection, very much a colleague s reading.

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