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Philip Roth

    March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018

    Philip Roth was an American novelist whose works often delve into themes of Jewish identity, the American dream, and the complexities of human sexuality. His style is known for its penetrating introspection, energetic prose, and occasional use of irony. Roth frequently explored the dilemmas and conflicts of his characters with an unflagging curiosity. Many of his novels, including those featuring his fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, offer profound insights into the American experience.

    Philip Roth
    Novels & stories, 1959-1962. Goodbye, Columbus & Five Short Stories, Letting Go
    Life with a star
    Zuckerman Bound
    American pastoral
    A Philip Roth Reader
    Patrimony
    • The Sentence

      • 400 pages
      • 14 hours of reading

      From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich comes a richly layered novel that explores identity, exploitation, and how the burdens of history still shape our lives today.

      The Sentence2025
      3.9
    • Forest dark

      • 290 pages
      • 11 hours of reading

      JULES EPSTEIN IS UNDERGOING A TRANSFORMATION It began in the wake of his parents' death, when he divorced his wife of over thirty-five years, retired from his legal firm, and started rapidly shedding the possessions he'd spent a lifetime accumulating. With the last of his wealth and a nebulous plan, he departs New York for the Tel Aviv Hilton. Meanwhile, a novelist leaves her husband and children behind in Brooklyn and checks in to the same hotel, hoping that the view of the pool she used to swim in on childhood holidays will unlock her writer's block. But when a man claiming to be a retired professor of literature recruits her for a project involving Kafka, she is drwan in to a mystery that will change her life in ways she could never have imagined. Bursting with life and humour, this is a novel of metamorphosis and self-realisation - of looking beyond all that is visible towards the infinite.

      Forest dark2017
      3.1
    • folio: Némésis

      • 272 pages
      • 10 hours of reading

      Situé dans les environs de Newark, à l'époque où éclate une terrible épidémie de polio, Némésis décrit avec précision le jeu des circonstances sur nos vies. Pendant l'été 1944, Bucky Cantor, un jeune homme de vingt-trois ans, vigoureux, doté d'un grand sens du devoir, anime et dirige un terrain de jeu. Lanceur de javelot, haltérophile, il a honte de ne pas avoir pris part à la guerre aux côtés de ses contemporains en raison de sa mauvaise vue. Tandis que la maladie provoque des ravages parmi les enfants qui jouent sur le terrain, Roth nous fait sentir chaque parcelle d'émotion que peut susciter une telle calamité : peur, panique, colère, perplexité, souffrance et peine. Des rues de Newark au camp de vacances rudimentaire, haut dans les Poconos, Némésis dépeint avec tendresse le sort réservé aux enfants, le glissement de Cantor dans la tragédie personnelle et les effets terribles que produit une épidémie de polio sur la vie d'une communauté de Newark, étroitement organisée autour de la famille.

      folio: Némésis2014
      4.2
    • The Periodic Table

      • 224 pages
      • 8 hours of reading

      Primo Levi's The Periodic Table is a collection of short stories that intertwine the author's experiences in Fascist Italy and Auschwitz with his passion for science. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is translated by Raymond Rosenthal and includes an essay on Levi by Philip Roth. A chemist by training, Levi became a profound witness to twentieth-century atrocities. In these poignant reflections inspired by the periodic table, he explores themes from young love to political brutality, using elements as metaphors. For example, 'Iron' honors a mountain-climbing resistance hero, while 'Cerium' recalls improvised cigarette lighters that saved his life in Auschwitz. 'Vanadium' describes a haunting post-war correspondence with his former boss there. Roth's essay features a conversation with Levi, examining his writing process, identity, and the interplay between science, literature, and survival. Levi (1919-87), an Italian Jew and Holocaust survivor, gained recognition in the English-speaking world late in his life and is regarded as one of the century's most compelling voices. The Periodic Table is his most celebrated work, alongside other titles like Moments of Reprieve and If Not Now, When?. Roth, a Pulitzer Prize and Man Booker International Prize winner, adds depth to this edition. If you appreciate this work, you may also enjoy Levi's other writings.

      The Periodic Table2014
      4.1
    • L'Amérique de Philip Roth

      • 1152 pages
      • 41 hours of reading

      Ce volume explore cinquante ans d'histoire américaine au sein de la communauté juive de Newark, de l'avant-guerre aux années 1980, à travers une approche non chronologique. L'auteur aborde le mouvement de la contre-culture des années 1960, la guerre froide et la croisade anticommuniste des années 1950, ainsi que le politiquement correct des années 1970-1980. Il imagine également des années 1940 hypothétiques, marquées par la montée du fascisme et de l'antisémitisme aux États-Unis. À travers une critique acerbe de la société américaine, l'auteur analyse les mécanismes d'un individu confronté à l'imprévisible. Les personnages, face à des bouleversements majeurs, voient leurs destins se briser sous l'effondrement des illusions et des certitudes qui soutenaient leurs vies idéales, symboles du rêve américain. Quatre œuvres illustrent l'identité de l'individu pris dans la tyrannie des mythes américains, évoquant un avenir prometteur qui semblait découler d'un passé solide. Chaque génération, en dépassant les limitations des aînés, aspire à jouir pleinement des droits conférés par l'Amérique, à s'émanciper des anciennes obsessions et à vivre sans complexes parmi ses pairs.

      L'Amérique de Philip Roth2013
      3.7
    • ВОЗМУЩЕНИЕ (Vozmushhenie)

      • 223 pages
      • 8 hours of reading

      Филип Рот (р. 1933) - признанный классик американской литературы. Это единственный писатель, трижды награжденный премией Уильяма Фолкнера. Самая нелепая и ничтожная случайность может дать трагический поворот человеческой судьбе. Так, и юного Марка череда ошибок, незаметных на первый взгляд, ввергла в кровавый хаос Корейской войны. Череда ошибок и кипящее в нем возмущение.

      ВОЗМУЩЕНИЕ (Vozmushhenie)2012
      4.0
    • Nemesis, English edition

      • 288 pages
      • 11 hours of reading

      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.

      Nemesis, English edition2010
      3.9
    • Er ist Anwalt, 33 und hat nur eines im Kopf: Sex. Ob Alexander Portnoy in der Öffentlichkeit onaniert, es mit einem Stück Leber treibt oder seine Freundin zu einem Dreier nötigt - stets ist er hin- und hergerissen zwischen Begierden, die mit seinem Gewissen unvereinbar sind, und einem Gewissen, das mit seinen Begierden unvereinbar ist. Beim Psychiater lässt er sein verwirrtes Leben Revue passieren. Mit „Portnoys Beschwerden“ hat Philip Roth eine brillante Satire geschrieben und zugleich den Prototyp des Sexualneurotikers erfunden. Vierzig Jahre nach der Erstveröffentlichung hat der Weltbestseller in einer Neuübersetzung nichts von seiner überschäumenden Komik eingebüßt.

      Portnoys Beschwerden: Neu übersetzt von Werner Schmitz2009
    • Vidnesbyrd

      Hvis dette er et menneske, Tøbruddet, De druknede og de frelste

      • 522 pages
      • 19 hours of reading

      Primo Levis vidnesbyrd fra Auschwitz er tre af det 20. århundredes allervigtigste litterære værker. Den 13. december 1943 arresteres den italiensk-jødiske kemiker Primo Levi i Alperne og føres til dødslejren Auschwitz. Det er begyndelsen på en grum fortælling, om hvordan man overlever kz-lejrenes ubegribelige brutalitet og meningsløshed, om vejen tilbage til de levendes verden, om behovet for at aflægge vidnesbyrd - om behovet for at blive hørt. De tre værker er en dyster udforskning af det, vi forstår som menneskelighed fyldt med visdom og sort humor på trods. Denne udgave samler for første gang Primo Levis tre bøger om Auschwitz på dansk.

      Vidnesbyrd2009
      4.6
    • The Humbling

      • 140 pages
      • 5 hours of reading

      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 60s, 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 on stage 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 the 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 persuade 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 retrospective on youth and chance in Indignation, Roth has written another in his haunting group of late novels.

      The Humbling2009
      3.3
    • Indignation

      • 233 pages
      • 9 hours of reading

      America, 1951. Marcus Messner, from Newark, New Jersey, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. Far away from home, in the Midwestern college, Marcus has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.

      Indignation2008
      3.7
    • Exit Ghost

      • 292 pages
      • 11 hours of reading

      Returning to New York after eleven years, Nathan Zuckerman finds a transformed city. Having lived in solitude on his New England mountain, he has focused solely on writing, free from distractions and the burdens of modern life. However, his re-entry into the city quickly disrupts his isolation. He forms a connection with a young couple, offering to swap homes: they will escape post-9/11 Manhattan for his rural retreat, while he returns to urban life. This arrangement awakens Zuckerman's desires, particularly for the young woman, Jaime, reigniting his longing for intimacy and passion. His second connection is with Amy Bellette, once his muse and companion to his literary idol, E.I. Lonoff. Now aged and frail, Amy clings to memories of Lonoff, the writer who inspired Zuckerman's solitary journey into literature. The third connection is with a young biographer eager to uncover Lonoff's "great secret," pulling Zuckerman into a web of love, loss, and rivalry that he had hoped to avoid. As he navigates these relationships, Zuckerman grapples with themes of desire, mourning, and the complexities of human connection. This narrative reflects Roth's signature style and thematic depth, marking a significant evolution in his exploration of fiction.

      Exit Ghost2007
      3.6
    • Everyman

      • 192 pages
      • 7 hours of reading

      WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral and “our most accomplished novelist” (The New Yorker) turns his attention 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. The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.

      Everyman2006
      3.6
    • Amerikansk pastorale

      • 421 pages
      • 15 hours of reading

      Philip Roth forteller her historien til Seymore Levov. Ved første øyekast framstår han som en ekte amerikansk suksesshistorie. Han var berømt idrettshelt som ung, giftet seg med en tidligere Miss New Jersey, overtar farens hanskefabrikk, og kjøper seg et stort, idyllisk hus på landet. I 1968 tar Seymores amerikanske drøm brått slutt. Datteren Merry utløser en bombe som tar livet av en uskyldig mann. Seymore er revet mellom farens moralske absolutter og datterens sinte avvisninger, og framstår som en ganske alminnelig mann som helt uventet befinner seg i en vanskelig situasjon. "Amerikansk pastorale" inngår i samme trilogi som "Menneskemerket" (2005).

      Amerikansk pastorale2005
    • "The title novella, Goodbye, Columbus, the story of a summer romance between a poor young man from Newark and a rich Radcliffe co-ed, is both a tightly wrought tale of youthful desire and a satiric gem that takes aim at the comfortable affluence of the postwar boom. Here and in the stories that accompany it, including "The Conversion of the Jews" and "Defender of the Faith," Roth depicts Jewish lives in 1950s America with an unflinching sharpness of observation." In Letting Go, a sprawling novel set largely against the backdrop of Chicago in the 1950s, Roth portrays the moral dilemmas of young people cast precipitously into adulthood, and in the process describes a skein of social and family responsibilities as they are brought into focus by issues of marriage, abortion, adoption, friendship, and career. The novel's expansiveness provides a wide scope for Roth's gift for vivid characterization, and in his protagonist Gabe Wallach he creates a nuanced portrait of a responsive young academic whose sense of morality draws him into the ordeals of others with unforeseen consequences.Library of America #157

      Novels & stories, 1959-1962. Goodbye, Columbus & Five Short Stories, Letting Go2005
      4.1
    • Tache Roth

      • 479 pages
      • 17 hours of reading

      En 1998, les révélations concernant le président divisent la nation américaine, illustrant la tragédie de Silks, qui cache un secret depuis 50 ans à sa famille.

      Tache Roth2004
      3.8
    • The Plot Against America

      • 400 pages
      • 14 hours of reading

      In a novel of alternative history, aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, negotiating an accord with Adolf Hitler and accepting his conquest of Europe and anti-Semitic policies.

      The Plot Against America2004
      3.8
    • Shop Talk

      A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work

      • 176 pages
      • 7 hours of reading

      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. With Primo Levi, Roth discusses the stubborn core of rationality that helped the Italian chemist-writer survive the demented laboratory of Auschwitz. With Milan Kundera, he analyzes the mix of politics and sexuality that made him the most subversive writer in communist Czechoslovakia. With Edna O'Brien, he explores the circumstances that have forced generations of Irish writers into exile. Elsewhere Roth offers appreciative portraits of two friends--the writer Bernard Malamud and the painter Philip Guston--at the end of their careers, and gives us a masterful assessment of the work of Saul Bellow. Intimate, charming, and crackling with ideas about the interplay between imagination and the writer's historical situation, Shop Talk is a literary symposium of the highest level, presided over by America's foremost novelist.

      Shop Talk2001
      3.7
    • The Dying Animal

      • 176 pages
      • 7 hours of reading

      David, white-haired & over 60, is a TV culture critic & 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 & haunts him for the next eight years.

      The Dying Animal2001
      3.4
    • Set in 1998, with the backdrop of the impeachment of a president, this book shows us an America where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions result in public denunciations and houndings, and where innocence is not always a good enough excuse.

      The human stain2000
      3.9
    • I married a communist

      • 400 pages
      • 14 hours of reading

      Radio actor Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold), an idealistic Communist and uneducated ditchdigger turned popular performer, emerges from serving in World War II passionately committed to making the world a better place and winds up instead blacklisted and unemployable. On his way to his political catastrophe, he marries the nation's reigning radio actress the exquisitely refined Eva Frame. Their marriage evolves from a glamorous, romantic idyll to tears and treachery. And, with Eve's dramatic revelation to a gossip columnist of her husband's 'espionage' for the Soviet Union, the relationship becomes a national scandal. Set in the heart of the McCarthy era, the story of Iron Rinn's disgrace is a story of cruelty, humiliation, betrayal and revenge; an American tragedy as only Philip Roth can conceive one - fierce and funny, eloquently rendered and deadly accurate.

      I married a communist1998
      3.9
    • American pastoral

      • 500 pages
      • 18 hours of reading

      The tragic impact of the Vietnam War on a relationship between father and daughter. The father is an upstanding individual who believes in the American Dream, but his daughter has a different dream, to get America out of Vietnam and she kills innocent people to achieve it. For the father it is the end of the world, he has lost his daughter. By the author of Sabbath's Theater

      American pastoral1997
      4.2
    • Grün hinter den Ohren

      • 123 pages
      • 5 hours of reading

      Ein kleiner Band mit zwei Erzählungen und einer kurzen Rede Philip Roths anläßlich eines Preises, den er erhielt, entnommen sind die Erzählungen anderen Büchern, herausgegeben wurde diese Zusammenstellung im Rahmen der Reihe "50 Jahre Rowohlt Rotations Romane".

      Grün hinter den Ohren1996
      3.0
    • Sabbath's theater

      • 464 pages
      • 17 hours of reading

      This is the story of Mickey Sabbath, a disgraced puppeteer who, after the death of his long-time mistress, embarks on a raging journey into dionysian extremism, madness and bitter understanding. Philip Roth won the 1995 National Book Award.

      Sabbath's theater1995
      3.9
    • Survival in Auschwitz

      The Nazi Assault on Humanity

      • 214 pages
      • 8 hours of reading

      Survival in Auschwitz is a mostly straightforward narrative, beginning with Primo Levi's deportation from Turin, Italy, to the concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland in 1943. Levi, then a 25-year-old chemist, spent 10 months in the camp. Even Levi's most graphic descriptions of the horrors he witnessed and endured there are marked by a restraint and wit that not only gives readers access to his experience, but confronts them with it in stark ethical and emotional terms: "[A]t dawn the barbed wire was full of children's washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundred other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him something to eat today?" --Michael Joseph Gross

      Survival in Auschwitz1995
      4.2
    • Operation Shylock

      • 400 pages
      • 14 hours of reading

      WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral—a fiendishly imaginative book that features Israeli intelligence agents, Palestinian exiles, an accused war criminal, and an enticing charter member of an organization called Anti-Semites Anonymous "One of Roth's grand inventions.... [He is] a comic genius." —The New York Review of Books In this 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 wild cast of characters, Operation Shylock barrels across the frontier between fact and fiction, seriousness and high comedy, history and nightmare.

      Operation Shylock1993
      3.8
    • Patrimony

      • 238 pages
      • 9 hours of reading

      The best-selling author offers his observations of the physical decline and death of his own father, in a memoir of the love between father and son

      Patrimony1991
      4.3
    • Die Tatsachen

      • 235 pages
      • 9 hours of reading

      Die Tatsachen - das sind die faktischen Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen des Autors, aus denen die fiktiven Personen und Handlungen seiner Romane entstanden sind: die Jugend im jüdischen Kleinbürgermilieu, der erste Zusammenstoß mit dem Antisemitismus, die Katastrophe einer Ehe und Erschütterungen durch den Vietnamkrieg. Und mit Verblüffung erkennt der Leser, in welchem Maße die Welt im Roman von Philip Roth der Wirklichkeit entspricht.

      Die Tatsachen1991
      3.7
    • A fictional account of the persecution and suffering of the Jews. It is simple in style and full of dark humour, irony and lyricism. The author served in Moscow as a member of the Czech section of the Comintern but was later expelled from the Communist party. This is his best-known novel.

      Life with a star1990
      4.1
    • Deception

      • 208 pages
      • 8 hours of reading

      He 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.

      Deception1990
      3.4
    • Rozhovor v Praze

      • 29 pages
      • 2 hours of reading

      Rozhovor Ivana Klímy s americkým spisovatelem Philipem Rothem o české disidentské a emigrantské literatuře, o jejím poslání a lidech, kteří ji tvořili. Rozhovor původně vyšel v The New York Review 12. 4. 1990, česky pak knižně vyšel jako katalog k výstavě Kde domov můj?.

      Rozhovor v Praze1990
      5.0
    • The Facts

      A Novelist's Autobiography

      • 208 pages
      • 8 hours of reading

      The unconventional autobiography of the Pulitzer Prize–winnning, bestselling author—"the most vigorous and truthful of American writers" ( Newsday )—who 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 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.

      The Facts1989
      3.7
    • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A “magnificent…splendid” novel (The New York Times Book Review) from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral about people living out their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them even risking their lives to change their seemingly irreversible fates. Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book's evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the mind 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.

      The Counterlife1988
      3.8
    • 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

      Zuckerman Bound1986
      4.0
    • 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.

      The Prague orgy1986
      3.5
    • With 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. What will it take for the pain to finally leave him alone?

      The Anatomy Lesson1984
      3.7
    • Zuckerman Unbound

      • 240 pages
      • 9 hours of reading

      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.

      Zuckerman Unbound1981
      3.9
    • A Philip Roth Reader

      • 483 pages
      • 17 hours of reading

      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

      A Philip Roth Reader1980
      4.2
    • The Ghost Writer

      • 156 pages
      • 6 hours of reading

      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...

      The Ghost Writer1979
      3.8
    • 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 we follow Kepesh into the wilderness of erotic possibility, we discover an intelligent and often hilarious novel about the dilemma of pleasure. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

      The Professor of Desire1977
      3.6
    • Fascinating interviews, essays, and articles spanning a quarter century on writing, baseball, American fiction, and American Jews—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century."An illuminating...glimpse of the theory and practice that have made Roth a major figure in American fiction." — Chicago Daily NewsHere is Philip 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 so much more. The essential collection of nonfiction by a true American master, Reading Myself and Others features his famed long interview with the Paris Review .

      Reading Myself and Others1975
      3.8
    • Letting Go is 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 liason between Gabe and Martha and Gabe's moral enthusiasm for the trials of others are at the heart of this tragically comic work.

      Letting Go1974
      3.7
    • The Pulitzer Prize–winning, internationally acclaimed author of American Pastoral delivers a fierce tragedy of sexual need and blindness. • "Roth's best.” —Newsweek 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.

      My Life as a Man1974
      3.7
    • Gill Gamesh, John Baal, Rupert Mundys: If you've never heard of them, it's because of the Communist plot, and the capitalist scandal, that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory. This novel turns baseball's status as national passtime and myth into an occasion for unfettered picturesque heroism and perfidy, and ebullient wordplay.

      The Great American Novel1973
      3.6
    • 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 this fantasy has become a 155-pound female breast. What follows is a funny exploration of the implications of metamorphosis.

      The Breast1973
      3.1
    • ," . . [a] comic masterpiece, a glittering virtuoso performance. It is laughing-out-loud funny . . ." - Wall Street JournalUnabridged on audio, read by Ron Silver and directed by the author, Philip Roth Portnoy's Complaint is the famously outrageous confession made to his analyst by Alexander Portnoy, the Huck Finn of Newark, who is trust through life by his unappeasable sexuality, yet held back at the same time by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood. Thirty years after it was first published, Portnoy's Complaint remains a classic of American literature, a tour de force of comic and carnal brilliance, and probably the funniest book about sex ever written. It was recently designated one of the hundred best books of the twentieth century by the Modern Library judges."An American masterpiece." -Life

      Portnoy's complaint1970
      3.7
    • Jde o výsek z rodinného a osobního života dvou hlavních hrdinů, mladých učitelů na vysoké škole v Chicagu. Jejich společným znakem je zájem a pochopení hraničící až se slabostí pro ostatní lidské bytosti. První román jednoho z nejuznávanějších talentů současné americké prózy (nar.1933), zachycující osobní a rodinný život dvou mladých židovských učitelů na vysoké škole v Chicagu a demonstrující tak na jejich stycích s americkými ženami situaci nesčetných „smíšených“ manželství a „smíšených“ milostných vztahů. Příběh, ve kterém se pod humorným tónem předvádí mnoho žalu a trápení, vyplývajících z neschopnosti řešit složité a vzájemně se křížícícitové vztahy.Přestože se zde autor vyhýbá sociální tematice a zaměřuje se na konflikty osobní, přesto si nelze nepovšimnout, že pozadím jeho děje je Amerika nejsnadnějších kariér a nejpřístupnějšího blahobytu.

      Ať se děje, co se děje1968
    • When She Was Good

      • 352 pages
      • 13 hours of reading

      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

      When She Was Good1967
      3.6
    • Novela amerického autora (nar. 1933), který patří vedle Salingera a Updika k předním představitelům mladší generace spisovatelů. Je to příběh lásky mladého knihovníka a dívky ze zámožné židovské rodiny, kteří na cestě k možnému manželství ztroskotají na nesouhlasu rodičů a zároveň i na nedostatečné pevnosti svého citu.

      Sbohem, město C1966
    • Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin - he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills - meet one summer and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella, the first book published by Phillip Roth, explores issues of both class and Jewish assimilation into American culture. It won the National Book Award in 1960. ©1993 Phillip Roth (P)2009

      Goodbye, Columbus1959
      3.9