roth's Award-winning First Book Instantly Established Its Author's Reputation As A Writer Of Explosive Wit, Merciless Insight, And A Fierce Compassion For Even The Most Self-deluding Of His Characters.goodbye, Columbus Is 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. The Novella Is Accompanied By Five Short Stories That Range In Tone From The Iconoclastic To The Astonishingly Tender And That Illuminate The Subterranean Conflicts Between Parents And Children And Friends And Neighbors In The American Jewish Diaspora.publishers Weeklyfollowing The Recent Release Of Roth's Vitriolic Novel, I Married A Communist (also Produced Unabridged From Dove, With Ron Silver Reading), It's Refreshing To Hear His Most Playful Early Material Revisited. The Title Novel And Accompanying Stories Are Read By A List Of Top-notch Performers. The Title Story, The Coming-of-age Tale Of Newark's Neil Klugman, Is Read By John Rubinstein. Set In 1950s America, The Idealistic College Dropout Klugman Spends A Summer Wooing Brenda Patimkin, An Affluent Radcliffe Girl From The Nearby Suburb Of Short Hills. Their Gentle Courtship Is Disrupted By Issues Of Class, Religion And Sex. The Other Stories, Which Include The Conversion Of The Jews And You Can't Tell A Man By The Song He Sings, Are Read By Rubinstein, Jerry Zaks, Harlan Ellison, Elliott Gould And Theodore Bikel. All Do A Good Job Of Conveying Roth's Sardonic Humor, Which--even In This Younger Work--has A World-weary, Sorrowful Weightiness. But The True Gift Demonstrated Here Is Roth's Amazing Deadpan Wit, A Quality Exploited To Dramatic Ends When Read Aloud By The Adroit Veterans Employed. (feb.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship. With a new Afterword by the author for the 25th Anniversary edition.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral delivers his "richest, most rewarding novel" (The New York Times Book Review) about Micky Sabbath, a scandalous hero who embarks on a turbulent journey into his past.One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 YearsOnce an inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his long-time mistress—an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring surpassed even his own—Sabbath, bereft and grieving and besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century—a compulsively readable elegy for America’s promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss, and "one of Roth's most powerful novels ever" (The New York Times).Here is Philip Roth's masterpiece, featuring Nathan Zuckerman and the story of 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.For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of domestic terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, American Pastoral gives us Philip Roth at the height of his powers.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The chilling bestselling alternate history novel of what happens to one family when America elects a charismatic, isolationist president whose government embraces a folksy anti-Semitism—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral.“A terrific political novel.... Sinister, vivid, dreamlike...You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.” —The New York Times Book ReviewIn an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.

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 Philip Roth's Richly Conceived Fantasy Has Become A 155-pound Female Breast. What Follows Is A Deliriously Funny Yet Touching Exploration Of The Full Implications Of Kepesh's Metamorphosis—a Daring, Heretical Book That Brings Us Face To Face With The Intrinsic Strangeness Of Sex And Subjectivity.

Time Magazine Best American Novel (1993) In this fiendishly imaginative 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 cast of characters that includes Israeli intelligence agents, Palestinian exiles, an accused war criminal, and an enticing charter member of an organization called Anti-Semites Anonymous, Operation Shylock barrels across the frontier between fact and fiction, seriousness and high comedy, history and nightmare. In this fiendishly imaginative, dizzyingly paced bestseller, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Someone with that name has been touring the State of Israel, promoting a bizarre exodus in reverse, and it is up to Roth to stop him--even if that means impersonating his impersonator.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral delivers “a master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled modern moment" (The Wall Street Journal).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. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."

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.Publishers WeeklyThe protagonist of Roth's first full-length novel vicariously explores the angst of love and marriage. (Sept.)

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.The first volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The Ghost Writer is about the tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency—and about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other.Library JournalBoth these novels follow protagonist Nathan Zuckerman through different times in his life-Ghost Writer, dubbed a "glowing work of fiction" by LJ's reviewer (LJ 9/1/79), introduced the character in his youth, while 1981's Unbound offers him in his mid-30s. Roth's many fans will be happy to see these again.

In this funny and chilling novel, the setting is a small town in the 1940s Midwest, and the subject is the heart of a wounded and ferociously moralistic young woman, one of those implacable American moralists whose "goodness" is a terrible disease. 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. With his unerring portraits of Lucy and her hapless, childlike husband, Roy, Roth has created an uncompromising work of fictional realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning, and discontent that is at once pitiless and compassionate.

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 Strinberg-a fierce tragedy of sexual need and blindness. The spirited story of a young writer's attempt to free himself from a woman who won't let go.

This Volume Presents The Trilogy Of Novellas And Epilogue That Constitute Zuckerman Bound (1985), Philip Roth's Original Investigation Into The Unforeseen Consequences Of Art - Mainly In Libertarian America And Then, By Contrast, In Soviet-suppressed Eastern Europe - During The Latter Half Of The Twentieth Century.--jacket. The Ghost Writer -- Zuckerman Unbound -- The Anatomy Lesson -- The Prague Orgy. Philip Roth ; [ross Miller, Editor]. Includes Chronology And Notes.

A ferocious political satire in the great tradition, Our Gang is Philip Roth’s brilliantly indignant response to the phenomenon of Richard M. Nixon.In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth shows us a man who outdoes the severest cynic, a peace-loving Quaker and believer in the sanctity of human life who doesn’t have a problem with killing unarmed women and children in self-defense. A master politician with an honest sneer, he finds himself battling the Boy Scouts, declaring war on Pro-Pornography Denmark, all the time trusting in the basic indifference of the voting public.

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 Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a ménage a trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a supremely intelligent, affecting, and often hilarious novel about the dilemma of pleasure: where we seek it; why we flee it; and how we struggle to make a truce between dignity and desire.“Philip Roth is a great historian of modern eroticism. . . . [He] speaks of a sexuality that questions itself; it is still hedonism, but it is problematic, wounded, ironic hedonism. His is the uncommon union of confession and irony. Infinitely vulnerable in his sincerity and infinitely elusive in his irony.” —Milan Kundera“A thoughtful . . . elegant novel. . . . A fine display of literary skills.” —The New York Times Book ReviewLibrary JournalLJ's reviewer dubbed this volume ``an entertaining, mature exploration of the conflicts of passion and reason'' (LJ 9/15/77). The plot follows protagonist David Kepesh, who moves between a life of scholarship and carnal adventure. The paperback publication of Roth's Operation Shylock (LJ 4/15/93) should generate interest in this earlier novel.

Gil Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire. The ex-con first baseman, John Baal, "The Babe Ruth of the Big House," who never hit a home run sober. If you've never heard of them—or of the Ruppert Mundys, the only homeless big-league ball team in American history—it's because of the Communist plot, and the capitalist scandal, that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory. In this ribald, richly imagined, and wickedly satiric novel, Roth turns baseball's status as national pastime and myth into an occasion for unfettered picaresque farce, replete with heroism and perfidy, ebullient wordplay and a cast of characters that includes the House Un-American Activities Committee. Now that whaling is banned and the Mississippi is a tourist attraction, the subject for anything resembling The Great American Novel could only be baseball. And the author could only be Philip Roth, who in this ribald, wickedly satiric book tells the story of the Ruppert Mundys, the only homeless baseball team in American history.

Ira Ringold, A Ditchdigger From Newark, Rises To Prominence In The 1940s As A Radio Star And Is Betrayed By His New Wife, Silent Film Star Eve Frame, Who Reveals His Communist Connections During The Mccarthy Witch Hunts Of The Early 1950s

Against the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life’s unimagined chances and terrifying consequences.It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio’s Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad—mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy.As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father’s fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.Indignation, Philip Roth’s twenty-ninth book, is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage, and error. It is a story told with all the inventive energy and wit Roth has at his command, at once a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in his recent books and a powerful addition to his investigations of the impact of American history on the life of the vulnerable individual.The Barnes & Noble ReviewPhilip Roth must have emerged indignant from the womb, so fiery has been the burning thread of fury glowing through the heart of his oeuvre: Class resentment appears early in his debut, Goodbye Columbus. By the time Portnoy's Complaint rolls raucously into town, this has transformed into something considerably deeper and rawer: "What I'm saying, Doctor, is that I don't seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds..." Nathan Zuckerman expressed resentment at the demands of celebrity. Revulsion against puritan politics informs the celebrated American Trilogy, and in his final act, confronted with mortality and clash between Eros and Thanatos, Roth now rages against the dying of the light.

Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The best-selling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) 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. A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him. He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has become what he does not want to be. The terrain of this powerful novel—Roth's twenty-seventh book and the fifth to be published in the twenty-first century—is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all. Everyman takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century allegorical play, a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death.

“With the lover everyday life recedes,” Roth writes — and exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, he presents in Deception the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction. At the center of Deception are two adulterers in their hiding place. He is a middle-aged American writer named Philip, living in London, and she is an articulate, intelligent, well-educated Englishwoman compromised by a humiliating marriage to which, in her thirties, she is already nervously half-resigned. The action consists of conversation — mainly the lovers talking to each other before and after making love. That dialogue — sharp, rich, playful, inquiring, “moving,” as Hermione Lee writes, “on a scale of pain from furious bafflement to stoic gaiety” — is nearly all there is to this audiobook, and all there needs to be.“A fiendishly clever piece of work . . . an amazing feat. . . . He’s invented the purest speech, the most convincing cadences, of any American novelist.” — William Pritchard, Hudson ReviewPublishers WeeklyConversations, most of them between an American writer living in London and his English mistress, make up what PW called ``a clever comedy of manners that segues--as is the author's wont--into a disquisition on the distinction between literature and life.'' (Feb.)

No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you’re not superior to sex. With these words our most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college–as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete’s critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated. The agency of Kepesh’s undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous and humblingly beautiful 24-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged–helplessly, bitterly, furiously–into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling this descent, Philip Roth performs a breathtaking set of variations on the themes of eros and mortality, license and repression, selfishness and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.Salon - Charles TaylorThe productivity and urgency of Roth's work for the past decade stand alone in contemporary American fiction. This novel is clearly an attempt to get down what he knows about life and culture. But surely dispatches this urgent have rarely been so honed, so irreducible and hard, so compassionate and unforgiving. There isn't an American writer working who can touch him.

Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age.Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body.The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman’s youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman’s first literary hero, E. I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation.The third connection is with Lonoff’s would-be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff’s “great secret.” Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.Haunted by Roth’s earlier work The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer’s insatiable commitment to fiction.The Barnes & Noble ReviewWe should have known he would not go gentle into that good night. From the moment Philip Roth emerged in print, almost 40 years ago now, his prose reveled in its coherent vitality. "Unlike those of us who come howling into the world, blind and bare," Saul Bellow wrote at the time, "Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair, teeth, speaking coherently. He is skilled, witty, energetic and performs like a virtuoso." How could something so exuberant ever die? But in recent years, as Roth surpassed middle age and then sailed into his 70s, he has begun to see death less as a joke and more like the mandate it is.

At forty, 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. Zuckerman, whose work was his life, is unable to write a line. Now, his work is trekking from one doctor to another, but none can find a cause for the pain and nobody can assuage it. Zuckerman himself wonders if the pain can have been caused by his own books. And while he is wondering, his dependence on painkillers grows into an addiction to vodka, marijuana, and Percodan.

The Facts is the unconventional autobiography of a writer who has 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. Author Biography: In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six years "for the entire work of the recipient."

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.

Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age.Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body.The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman’s youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman’s first literary hero, E. I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation.The third connection is with Lonoff’s would-be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff’s “great secret.” Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.Haunted by Roth’s earlier work The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer’s insatiable commitment to fiction.The Barnes & Noble ReviewWe should have known he would not go gentle into that good night. From the moment Philip Roth emerged in print, almost 40 years ago now, his prose reveled in its coherent vitality. Unlike those of us who come howling into the world, blind and bare, Saul Bellow wrote at the time, Mr. Roth appears with nails, hair, teeth, speaking coherently. He is skilled, witty, energetic and performs like a virtuoso. How could something so exuberant ever die? But in recent years, as Roth surpassed middle age and then sailed into his 70s, he has begun to see death less as a joke and more like the mandate it is.

In the "stifling heat of equatorial Newark," a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, lifelong disability, and even death. This is the startling theme of Philip Roth’s wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children. At the center of Nemesis is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges and disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor’s dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground—and on the everyday realities he faces—Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering, and the pain. Moving between the smoldering, malodorous streets of besieged Newark and Indian Hill, a pristine children’s summer camp high in the Poconos—whose "mountain air was purified of all contaminants"—Roth depicts a decent, energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic. Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantor’s passage into personal disaster, and no less exact about the condition of childhood. Through this story runs the dark questions that haunt all four of Roth’s late short novels, Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and now Nemesis: What kind of accidental choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand the onslaught of circumstance?

What Happens When All The Ways That We Convince Ourselves Of Our Solidity, All Our Life's Performances Are Stripped Off? Simon Axler, One Of The Leading American Stage Actors Of His Generation, Is About To Find Out. Now In His Sixties, He Has Lost His Magic, His Talent, And His Assurance. His Wife Has Gone, His Audience Has Left Him, His Agent Can't Persuade Him To Make A Comeback. Consumed By An Erotic Desire, He Plunges Into A Darker And More Shocking End.

Nicholson Baker. Originally Published In Hardcover By Random House, Inc., New York, In 1991--t.p. Verso.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. With a new afterword by the author.This "brutally powerful, mesmerizing story” (People) is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner.Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.“A masterwork.... Wonderful.... I can’t imagine American literature without it.” —John Leonard, Los Angeles Times