New Releases by Philip Roth

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 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.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • "A tough-minded, beautifully written memoir" (San Francisco Chronicle) about a son watching his elderly father battle with the brain tumor that will kill him—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral. 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—fights 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.

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.

《美国牧歌》 It is an elegy for all our century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. 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. “美国三部曲”之首的《美国牧歌》，体现了美国社会中由来已久的冲突：相信“美国梦”的人，以为只要努力和正派，就可美梦成真；然而历史的悲剧性常常和个人是否努力和正派无关。

《我嫁给了共产党人》 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 this story, cruelty, betrayal, and revenge spilling over into the public arena from their origins in Ira's turbulent personal life． 这个苦涩的、略带诙谐的故事自始至终都是那么引人入胜，它唤醒了我们共有的历史中那个特定的时间和地点……立体重现了二战后的理想主义和伪善。

《人性的污秽》 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 even his most virulent accuser. “美国三部曲”的登峰之作，与前两部相比，小说中各元素之间更加制衡，更具整体性，对人性的探讨更加彻底。小说重磅炸弹似的主题，注定其成为各方评论的主题。

Philip Roth's fictional alter-ego returns in Zuckerman Unbound, "...masterful, sure in every touch." (The New York Times) The sensationalizing sixties are coming to an end, and even writing a novel can make you a star. The writer Nathan Zuckerman publishes his fourth book, an aggressive, abrasive, and comically erotic novel entitled Carnovsky, and all at once he is on the cover of Life, one of the decade's most notorious celebrities. This is the same Nathan Zuckerman who in Philip Roth's much praised The Ghost Writer was the dedicated young apprentice drawing sustenance from the great books and the integrity of their authors. Now in his mid-thirties, Zuckerman, a would-be recluse despite his fame, ventures out on the streets of Manhattan, and not only is he assumed 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 admirers, admonishers, advisers, and would-be literary critics. The recent murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., lead an unsettled Nathan Zuckerman to wonder if "target" may be more than a figure of speech. Yet, streetcorner recognition and media notoriety are the least disturbing consequences of writing Carnovsky. Against his best interests, the newly renowned 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 his family. Even when finally he lives out the fantasies of his fans and enjoys an exhilarating night with the beautiful and worldly film star Caesara O'Shea (a rather more capable celebrity), he is dismayed the following morning by the caliber of the competition up in the erotic big leagues. In some of Zuckerman Unbound's funniest episodes Zuckerman endures the blandishments of another New Jersey boy who has briefly achieved his own moment of stardom. He is the broken and resentful fan Alvin Pepler, in the fifties a national celebrity on the TV quiz show "Smart Money." Thrust back into obscurity when headlined scandals forced the quiz show off the air, Pepler now attaches himself to Zuckerman and won't let go--an "Angel of Manic Delights" to the amused novelist (who momentarily sees him as his "pop self"), and yet also the likely source of a demonic threat. But the surprise that fate finally delivers is more devilish than any cooked up by Alvin Pepler, or even by Zuckerman's imagination. In the coronary-care unit of a Miami Hospital, Nathan's father bestows upon his older son not a blessing but what seems to be a curse. And, in an astonishingly bitter final turn, a confrontation with his brother opens the way for the novelist's deep and painful understanding of the deathblow that Carnovsky has dealt to his own past.

Philip Roth's The Professor of Desire is the story of an adventurous man of intelligence and feeling trying to make his way to both pleasure and dignity through a world of sensual possibilities. Temptation comes to him in both ordinary and spectacular forms, and the novel charts the history of his desire from the early years, when he accedes to it totally, to the time when he attempts to domesticate his passions (and his wife's) and finally to that most surprising moment when desire ebbs and, frighteningly, seems on the brink of disappearance. The book explores, in all its painful ramifications, the pursuit and loss of erotic happiness. Among the variety of places that comprise this world of sensual possibilities are the mountaintop resort hotel where David Kepesh spends his boyhood, the college in upstate New York where he begins life as a passionate man by describing himself to coeds he hopes to seduce with Lord Byron's dictum, "studious by day, dissolute by night"; a basement flat in London, where he lives with two Swedish girls, one of whom he even thinks fleetingly of turning into a prostitute. Drawing back from all that he comes to recognize as dangerous in himself, he takes up a serious, responsible vocation--as a professor of literature--but then, later, in California, takes up with Helen Baird, a young woman in flight from her own adventurous years in the Far East, which culminated in a narrowly aborted murder plot against her lover's wife. David marries this woman whom he thinks of as a "heroine," courageous in her sensual abandon as well as in her renunciations. The marriage, always at cross purposes, ends in disaster. Back now in New York City, Kepesh falls into a state of spiritual despair and physical impotence over the unhappiness he has caused himself and others. In his small sublet apartment he entertains his aging parents, who are puzzled by the course their only son's personal life has taken. While a persistent homosexual stranger conducts a ridiculous siege outside the door, and a champion womanizer attempts to reconvert him to satyrism, David himself wonders about his future as a lover of anyone. hen he meets Claire Ovington, a loving and orderly young teacher, "the most extraordinary ordinary person I've ever met." While in Europe on a romantic holiday, they travel to Kafka's grave in Prague, and afterwards, asleep in his mistress's arms, David dreams of a bizarre encounter with "Kafka's whore." Finally, in a rented Catskill house not far from the resort hotel where he was raised, David and Claire spend an idyllic summer, seemingly blessed by permanence and love. Kepesh's widowed father arrives for Labor Day weekend, with his friend, a concentration-camp survivor who has become old Mr. Kepesh's dearest companion. Their presence reinforces David's growing sense of the fragility of all existence, and in the last third of this novel--in a long conclusion that may be as moving as anything in contemporary fiction--Roth brings together all the strands of Kepesh's story in final scenes that are distinguished by an incomparably elegiac tone.

The definitive Philip Roth edition continues with three novels written in his late sixties and early seventies. The Dying Animal (2001) marks the final return of David Kepesh from The Breast (1972) and The Professor of Desire (1977). Now an eminent cultural critic in his sixties, Kepesh expertly seduces a beautiful twenty-four-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles only to find himself torn by sexual jealousy and the anguish of loss. As The Plot Against America (2004) begins, aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh has defeated Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, and fear invades every Jewish household in America. Lindbergh has publicly blamed the Jews for pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, and now in office, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler. What follows for Jews during the Lindbergh presidency—most particularly in the Newark household of the boy Philip Roth—is the subject of an extraordinary work of historical imagination. With Exit Ghost (2007) Roth rings down the curtain on perhaps his greatest literary creation. Nathan Zuckerman returns to a radically changed New York, the city he left eleven years before, where a rash decision draws him into a vivid drama rife with implications for his future, and his past. Philip Roth is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by The Library of America. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the National Medal of Arts, and the Gold Medal in Fiction, the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Amerika 1951, het tweede jaar van de Koreaanse Oorlog. Marcus Messner, een ijverige, gezagsgetrouwe en gevoelige jongen uit Newark, New Jersey, begint aan zijn tweede jaar aan de provinciaalse, conservatieve campus van Winesburg, Ohio. Waarom studeert hij daar en niet aan de plaatselijke universiteit van Newark, waar hij zich oorspronkelijk had ingeschreven? De reden is dat zijn overbezorgde vader, een robuuste, hardwerkende buurtslager, gek geworden lijkt te zijn van angst voor de alomtegenwoordige gevaren die zijn geliefde zoon bedreigen. Volgens zijn getergde en afgematte moeder komen zijn vaders angsten voort uit liefde en trots. Dat mag zo zijn, maar zijn vaders gedrag leidt tot zo veel woede bij Marcus dat hij niet langer bij zijn ouders kan blijven wonen. Hij vertrekt en probeert ver van Newark, op een universiteit in het Midden-Westen, zijn eigen weg te vinden en zich te verstaan met de gewoontes en beperkingen van een andere Amerikaanse wereld. Verontwaardiging , het negenentwintigste boek van Philip Roth, vertelt het coming-of-age-verhaal van deze jongeman en gaat daarnaast in op de beangstigende mogelijkheden en bizarre hindernissen die het leven biedt. Het is een verhaal over onervarenheid, dwaasheid, intellectuele weerstand, seksuele ontdekkingen, moed en verkeerde beslissingen, verteld met de inventieve energie en scherpzinnigheid die Roth eigen zijn. Het is zowel een verrassende afwijking van de beschrijvingen van het ouder worden in zijn recente romans als een indrukwekkende bijdrage aan zijn verkenningen van de impact van de Amerikaanse geschiedenis op het leven van het kwetsbare individu.

The first full-length novel from one of the most renowned writers of the twentieth century, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral, tells the story of a mid-century America and offers “further proof of Mr. Roth's astonishing talent…. Letting Go seethes with life” (The New York Times). Published when Roth was twenty-nine and set in Chicago, New York, and Iowa city, Letting Go presents as brilliant a fictional portrait as we have of America in the 1950s 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.

He is relentlessly defiant. He is exceedingly libidinous. His appetite for the outrageous is insatiable. He is Mickey Sabbath, the aging, raging powerhouse whose savage effrontery and mocking audacity are at the heart of Philip Roth's astonishing new novel. Sabbath's Theater tells Mickey's story in the wake of the death of his mistress, an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring exceeds even his own. Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Mickey is now in his mid-sixties and besieged by ghosts - of his mother, his beloved brother, his vanished first wife, his mistress of thirteen years. Bereft and grieving, he embarks on a turbulent journey back into his past, one that brings him to the brink of madness and extinction. But no matter how ardently he courts death, he is too exuberantly alive to succeed at dying. Sabbath's Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is its gargantuan hero. This book, which presents Philip Roth at the peak of his powers, is sur

Nous sommes en 1951, seconde année de la guerre de Corée. Marcus Messner, jeune homme de dix-neuf ans, intense et sérieux, d'origine juive, poursuit ses études au Winesburg College, dans le fin fond de l'Ohio. Il a quitté l'école de Newark, dans le New Jersey, où habite sa famille. Il espère par ce changement échapper à la domination de son père, boucher de sa profession, un homme honnête et travailleur, mais qui est depuis quelque temps la proie d'une véritable paranoïa au sujet de son fils bien-aimé. Fierté et amour, telles sont les sources de cette peur panique. Marcus, en s'éloignant de ses parents, va tenter sa chance dans une Amérique encore inconnue de lui, pleine d'embûches, de difficultés et de surprises. Indignation, le vingt-neuvième livre de Philip Roth, propose une forme de roman d'apprentissage : c'est une histoire d'audace et de folie, d'erreurs et de tâtonnements, de résistances et de révélations, tant sur le plan sexuel qu'intellectuel. Renonçant à sa description minutieuse de la vieillesse et de son cortège de maux, Philip Roth poursuit avec l'énergie habituelle son analyse de l'histoire de l'Amérique - celle des années cinquante, des tabous et des frustrations sexuelles - et de son impact sur la vie d'un homme jeune, isolé, vulnérable.

This fourth volume of The Library of Americas definitive edition of Roths collected works presents four novels that recount the story of budding American writer Nathan Zuckerman. Includes "The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson," and "The Prague Orgy."

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.

Cuando Charles A. Lindbergh voló en 1927 desde Nueva York hasta Paris convirtiéndose en el primer aviador americano que cruzaba el Atlántico, el novelista Philip Roth aprovecha esta hazaña para imaginar qué hubiera pasado si Lindbergh hubiera llegado a convertirse en el Presidente de Estados Unidos, derrotando a Franklin Roosevelt en las elecciones de 1940. Lindbergh en esta novela llega a un trato con Hitler, como buen antisemita, de hecho la realidad es que en 1938 este héroe se trasladó a vivir a Alemania y se convirtió en líder del controvertido movimiento aislacionista americano y aceptó una condecoración del Führer. En 1941 el presidente Roosevelt criticó su postura neutralista ante la Segunda guerra Mundial y muchos de sus compatriotas lo tacharon de antisemita. Philip Roth convierte esa historia en ficción, imaginando qué hubiera pasado si este héroe hubiera gobernado América y habla de las siniestras consecuencias para miles de familias judías americanas.

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’ 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY “A master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled modern moment." —The Wall Street Journal “By turns unnerving, hilarious, and sad. . . . It is a book that shows how the public zeitgeist can shape, even destroy, an individual's life." —The New York Times “The best novel he has written.” —The Times Literary Supplement 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 even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk’s secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled.

"Seymour 'Swede' Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall - of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder."--Publisher's website.

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.

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.

Exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, Roth presents in Deception the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction. At the center of the novel are Philip and his lover, an Englishwoman compromised by a humiliating marriage, and the conversation that ensues before and after making love. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

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

The first novel in Roth's Zuckerman Bound trilogy, 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 been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. If she were, it might change his life. --From publisher description.

Author Philip Roth tells the brilliant story of Brenda and Neil. After meeting one summer, the pair get themselves into a predicament by having an affair that involves just as much social class issues as it does love. Included are five other short stories that tell of conflicts that occured during the mid 20th century.