Philip Roth
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
Philip Roth's bestselling alternate history—the chilling story of what happens to one family when America elects a charismatic, isolationist president.
In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election
...3) Indignation
6) Everyman
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...
7) Nemesis
Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944. A javelin thrower and weightlifter, he is disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As the devastating disease
...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...
Private needs and public acts are inextricably joined... with disastrous consequences. Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold): Newark roughneck, radio actor, idealistic Communist, and educated ditch digger turned popular performer. A six-foot, six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he emerges from serving in World War II passionately committed to making the world a better place and instead winds up blacklisted, unemployable, and blighted by a brutal personal secret
...Philip Roth's brilliant career was launched when the unknown twenty-five-year-old writer won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for a collection that was to be called Goodbye, Columbus, and which, in turn, captured the 1960 National Book Award. In the famous title story, perhaps the best college love story ever written, Radcliffe-bound Brenda Patimkin initiates Neil Klugman of Newark into a new and unsettling
...11) Exit Ghost
Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully...
12) 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 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
...13) 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
...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?"), he also finds himself the target of admonishers, advisors, and sidewalk literary critics. The recent murders of Robert Kennedy
...15) Philip Roth Reading from Letting Go: From Great American Authors Read from Their Works, Volume 1
16) The human stain
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
The American psyche is channeled 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 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,
..."High, careful tragedy, nasty as life, and Roth emerges ... as a Dreiser who can write!" —Stanley Elkin
When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she...
"One of Roth's grand inventions.... [He is] a comic genius." —The New York Review of Books
In this...
19) 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,
...