Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground - and on the everyday realities he faces - this title leads us through various emotions such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering, and the pain.
Modern fictionIn 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War, student Marcus is pulled out of his New Jersey school and sent to Ohio by his paranoid father. On his own, far from home, Marcus must make his own way in the world.
Tells 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. This novella is also accompanied by five short stories.
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. This is the Pulitzer-prize winning novel that confirmed Philip Roth as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century and that still profoundly resonates today.
'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
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
Taking office as the 33rd President of the US, Charles A Lindbergh negotiated a cordial 'understanding' with Adolf Hitler. What then followed in America is the historical setting for this novel, which recounts the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst.
DISCOVER THE NOVEL BEHIND THE BRILLIANT NEW TV DRAMA '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?
When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A.Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide inthe1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America.Not only had Lindbergh publicly blamed the Jews for pushing America towards a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the 33rd president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial 'understanding' with Adolf Hitler. What then followed in America is thehistorical setting for this startling new novel by Pulitzer-prize winner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst.
Radio actor Iron Rinn is a roughneck blighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. An idealistic Communist turned popular performer, he marries America's reigning radio actress and silent movie star, Eve Frame. However, both his marriage and his life collapse.
Modern fictionExhibits all Roth's skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, presenting the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction.
Intended to be the personification of mankind, this work traces from the author's first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers. It is a human story of the regret and loss and stoicism of a man who becomes what he does not want to be.
In 'Zuckerman Unbound' - the second volume in the trilogy and epilogue 'Zuckerman Bound' - the notorious novelist 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.
Modern fictionNathan Zuckerman returns to New York after being away for 11 years and finds that everything has changed. Roth's previous book Everyman was a popular recommendation in the Books of the Year round-ups, and he is widely regarded as being the greatest living American writer. 'Consistently enthralling...full of tart humour and dancing intelligence' John Dugdale, Literary Review
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.
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.
Modern fictionPhilip Roth's new paperback deals with people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, often going so far as to risk their own lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies, and who are constantly tempted by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse fate.
David Kapesh, white-haired and over 60, is a TV culture critic and lecturer at a New York college. He meets Consuela, a 24-year-old student, daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who puts his life into erotic disorder and haunts him for the next eight years.
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.
Modern fictionFirst volume in a trilogy about the tensions between literature and life.
Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist. He is one of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent and his assurance. Into this shattering account of inexplicable and terrifying self-evacuation bursts a counterplot of unusual erotic desire.
Modern fictionA Vintage reissue. **New edition formally in May Buyers Notes**
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.
A collection of conversations and essays about writers and writing. The collection explores the importance of religion, politics and history in the work of others. The essays trace the imaginative path by which a writer's individualized art is informed by the wider conditions of life.