Exploring profound themes of identity, betrayal, and societal upheaval, this volume presents the American Trilogy, a landmark in contemporary literature. In American Pastoral, Swede Levov's idyllic life shatters due to his daughter's radical actions. I Married a Communist delves into the life of radio star Ira Ringold, whose marriage leads to his downfall amid anti-Communist sentiment. The Human Stain follows Coleman Silk, a professor whose forced retirement stems from false accusations of racism, revealing deeper truths about his life and the cultural climate of the time.
"For the last half century, the novels of Philip Roth have re-energized American fiction and redefined its possibilities. Roth's comic genius, his imaginative daring, his courage in exploring uncomfortable truths, and his assault on political, cultural, and sexual orthodoxies have made him one of the essential writers of our time. By special arrangement with the author, The Library of America continues the definitive edition of Roth's collected works." "The Counterlife (1986) is a book of astonishing 180-degree turns, of conflicting perspectives and points of view, and, by far, Roth's most radical novel to date. The subject is people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Illuminating these lives in transition is the skeptical, enveloping intelligence of the writer Nathan Zuckerman." "In 1987, a year after the imaginative extravaganza of The Counterlife, Roth reverses field with The Facts, the first of the "Roth Books." The Facts presents the author's own battles defictionalized and unadorned, and concludes with the unique assault that Roth mounts against his own proficiencies as an autobiographer." "At the center of the second of the Roth Books, Deception (1990), are a married American named Philip, living in London, and the married Englishwoman - trapped with a little child in a loveless upper-middle-class household - who eloquently and minutely reveals herself to her lover as they talk before and after making love. With the skill of a brilliant observer of the illicit and the intimate, Roth presents the highly enclosed world of adultery with a directness that has no equal in American fiction." "In the third Roth Book, Patrimony (1991), Philip Roth watches as Herman Roth, his 86-year-old father - famous for his vigor, his charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections - battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. The son accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, revealing the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished Herman's passionate engagement with life."--BOOK JACKET
"Published together for the first time as the author intended, Nemeses is a quartet of novels whose terrain is the human body and whose subject, the common experience that terrifies us all"--Publisher description.
This sixth volume of The Library of America's definitive edition of Philip Roth's collected works gathers two novels that marked the beginning of a decade-long creative explosion--one remarkable in an older writer and one heralded by critics as unparalleled in American literary history. In the fiendishly imaginative Operation Shylock, Philip Roth encounters a look-alike who claims Roth's identity and who tours Israel promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews--a look-alike whose proselytizing in his name the authentic Roth is intent on stopping, even if that means impersonating his own impersonator. "This splendidly wicked book" is how the critic Frank Kermode described Sabbath's Theater (1995), Roth's comic creation of epic proportions, whose gargantuan hero, Mickey Sabbath, grieving the loss of his unsurpassable mistress, embarks on a turbulent journey into his past besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most. --notes by editor Ross Miller
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.
"Throughout a unparalleled literary career that includes two National Book Awards (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959 and Sabbath's Theater, 1995), the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (American Pastoral, 1997), the National Book Critics Circle Award (The Counterlife, 1986), and the National Humanities Medal (awarded by President Obama in 2011), among many other honors, Philip Roth has produced an extraordinary body of nonfiction writing on a wide range of topics: his own work and that of the writers he admires, the creative process, and the state of American culture. This work is collected for the first time in Why Write?, the tenth and final volume in the Library of America's definitive Philip Roth edition. Here is Roth's selection of the indispensable core of Reading Myself and Others, the entirety of the 2001 book Shop Talk, and "Explanations," a collection of fourteen later pieces brought together here for the first time, six never before published. Among the essays gathered are "My Uchronia," an account of the genesis of The Plot Against America, a novel grounded in the insight that "all the assurances are provisional, even here in a two-hundred-year-old democracy"; "Errata," the unabridged version of the "Open Letter to Wikipedia" published on The New Yorker's website in 2012 to counter the online encyclopedia's egregious errors about his life and work; and "The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction," a speech delivered on the occasion of his eightieth birthday that celebrates the "refractory way of living" of Sabbath's Theater's Mickey Sabbath. Also included are two lengthy interviews given after Roth's retirement, which take stock of a lifetime of work."--Amazon
Selections from nine novels following Goodbye Columbus, Roth's first book, including Letting Go, Portnoy's Complaint, and The Ghost Writer, chronicle Roth's satiric and sensitive examination of art, life, and personal crisis
This third volume of Philip Roth's collected works features three distinct novels: "The Great American Novel," a humorous take on baseball's forgotten history; "My Life as a Man," a fierce marital battle; and "The Professor of Desire," exploring the complexities of eroticism. A vital addition to American literature.
Four complete works by Philip Roth in one volume. The complete comic saga of Nathan Zuckerman, his ordeals of conscience, from Manhattan, to Miami Beach, to Czechoslovakia!"Roth has transcended himself . . . . A comic genius . . . Certainly Philip Roth's finest achievement to date, eclipsing even his best single fictions . . . ZUCKERMAN BOUND binds together THE GHOST WRITER, ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND, and THE ANATOMY LESSON, adding to them as epilogue a wild short novel, THE PRAGUE ORGY, which is at once the bleakest and the funniest writing Roth has done."-- The New York Times Book Review"ZUCKERMAN BOUND proves that no one now writing can be funnier and, at the same time, more passionately serious than Philip Roth." -- Time"ZUCKERMAN BOUND shows the author's always ebullient invention and artful prose at their most polished and concentrated." -- The New Yorker
