A Philip Roth Reader

A Philip Roth Reader PDF Author: Philip Roth
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780099225218
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
An anthology of selections from eight of Philip Roth's early novels, with a definitive version of The Breast and the previously uncollected story Novotny's Pain, alongside the essay-story Looking At Kafka.

A Philip Roth Reader

A Philip Roth Reader PDF Author: Philip Roth
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780099225218
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
An anthology of selections from eight of Philip Roth's early novels, with a definitive version of The Breast and the previously uncollected story Novotny's Pain, alongside the essay-story Looking At Kafka.

A Philip Roth Reader

A Philip Roth Reader PDF Author: Philip Roth
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Short stories
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Roth Unbound

Roth Unbound PDF Author: Claudia Roth Pierpont
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374710449
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
A critical evaluation of Philip Roth—the first of its kind—that takes on the man, the myth, and the work Philip Roth is one of the most renowned writers of our time. From his debut, Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award in 1960, and the explosion of Portnoy's Complaint in 1969 to his haunting reimagining of Anne Frank's story in The Ghost Writer ten years later and the series of masterworks starting in the mid-eighties—The Counterlife, Patrimony, Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, American Pastoral, The HumanStain—Roth has produced some of the great American literature of the modern era. And yet there has been no major critical work about him until now. Here, at last, is the story of Roth's creative life. Roth Unbound is not a biography—though it contains a wealth of previously undisclosed biographical details and unpublished material—but something ultimately more rewarding: the exploration of a great writer through his art. Claudia Roth Pierpont, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has known Roth for nearly a decade. Her carefully researched and gracefully written account is filled with remarks from Roth himself, drawn from their ongoing conversations. Here are insights and anecdotes that will change the way many readers perceive this most controversial and galvanizing writer: a young and unhappily married Roth struggling to write; a wildly successful Roth, after the uproar over Portnoy, working to help writers from Eastern Europe and to get their books known in the West; Roth responding to the early, Jewish—and the later, feminist—attacks on his work. Here are Roth's family, his inspirations, his critics, the full range of his fiction, and his friendships with such figures as Saul Bellow and John Updike. Here is Roth at work and at play. Roth Unbound is a major achievement—a highly readable story that helps us make sense of one of the most vital literary careers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Nemesis

Nemesis PDF Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030747500X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Set in a close-knit Newark neighborhood during a terrifying polio outbreak in 1944, a “book [that] has the elegance of a fable and the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama” (The New Yorker)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral. 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 begins to ravage Bucky’s playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain. Moving between the streets of Newark and a pristine summer camp high in the Poconos, Nemesis tenderly and startlingly depicts Cantor’s passage into personal disaster, the condition of childhood, and the painful effect that the wartime polio epidemic has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.

Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books

Philip Roth and the Zuckerman Books PDF Author: Pia Masiero
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781604977547
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Philip Roth's standing on the literary scene is undisputed. The recipient of innumerable literary awards, the Jewish American author has reached past the precincts of his Newark's Weequahic neighborhood to become one of the most significant American novelists of the late twentieth century, an unrivalled master of the art of fiction. His literary output spanning more than 50 years and more than thirty books has been astounding both in terms of quantity and quality. Roth's place among the classics has been established by a host of critical studies presenting Roth's work from a myriad of thematic perspectives. Critical literature on Roth has become a minor industry of sorts and the interested reader may find a number of excellent general book-length treatments of his oeuvre. This book traces Zuckerman's fictional birth in My Life as a Man and The Ghost Writer, his growth through Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, The Prague Orgy, The Counterlife, The Facts, his development in American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain and his death in Exit Ghost, to explore how Roth has been progressively creating and refining this mask and his voice as a means to come to terms with his own biography, his history, and his own self as a writer. All the defining features of Roth's poetics-masking practices, ventriloquism, meta-fictional focus, cultural significance-are visible in the creation of Zuckerman as narrator. This study keeps up the ongoing reflection in Roth's scholarly literature on the foundational relationship between facts and fictions demonstrating how Zuckerman amplifies and perfects the typically Rothian tendency to draw materials for his fictional writing from his own life and reveals Roth's ambition to create a monument out of a specific and well individualized identity: the writer steeped in American history. As Roth's most cherished mask, Nathan Zuckerman opens for the reader interested in the Jewish American author a perfect window on the crucial issue of authorship and on the range of Roth's thematic preoccupations.In proposing to view The Ghost Writer as a narrative beginning, The Counterlife as a middle and Exit Ghost as an end, the book addresses the stakes at play in reading across multiple narratives directly: how is Zuckerman's identity shaped? How does narrative technique interact with biographical data? How do readers make (progressive) sense of Zuckerman and how do they cope with inconsistencies? What kind of coherence can be ascribed to Zuckerman in spite of the gaps his long narrative presents? What if anything is specifically "Jewish" about the creation of Zuckerman as narrator of numerous books? What are the literary functions, the formal and narratological underpinnings and the psychological needs Zuckerman activates and reveals?The book's groundbreaking contribution consists in a unique focus on the inner, that is to say, narratological logic of the fictional world presided over by Nathan Zuckerman and in the contextual attention to how form in its panoply of aspects triggers reader responses and activities. Masiero illuminates Roth's art of fiction through the detailed analysis of Roth's ambitious dream of creating a complete narrative microcosm.This book is important for the general reader interested in contemporary American fiction, as well as for teachers of American literature and Jewish studies, for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, and, of course for Roth scholars and literary theorists.

The Plot Against America

The Plot Against America PDF Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0547345313
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Philip Roth's bestselling alternate history—the chilling story of what happens to one family when America elects a charismatic, isolationist president—is soon to be an HBO limited series. In 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. For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America–and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother. "A terrific political novel . . . Sinister, vivid, dreamlike . . . creepily plausible. . . You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.” — The New York Times Book Review

The Humbling

The Humbling PDF Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0547416954
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
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 sixties, 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 onstage 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 a 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 convince ourselves of our solidity, all our life’s performances—talent, love, sex, hope, energy, reputation—are stripped off. The Humbling is Roth’s thirtieth book.

Here We Are

Here We Are PDF Author: Benjamin Taylor
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143133454
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award A deeply felt, beautifully crafted meditation on friendship and loss in the vein of A Year of Magical Thinking, and a touching portrait of Philip Roth from his closest friend. I had a baseball question on the tip of my tongue: What was the name of "the natural," the player shot by a stalker in a Chicago hotel room? He gave me an amused look that darkened in-to puzzlement, then fear. Then he pitched forward into the soup, unconscious. When I entered the examining room twenty minutes after our arrival at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, Philip said, "No more books." Thus he announced his retirement. So begins Benjamin Taylor's Here We Are, the unvarnished portrait of his best friend and one of America's greatest writers. Needless to say, Philip Roth's place in the canon is secure, but what is less clear is what the man himself was like. In Here We Are, Benjamin Taylor's beautifully constructed memoir, we see him as a mortal man, experiencing the joys and sorrows of aging, reflecting on his own writing, and doing something we all love to do: passing the time in the company of his closest friend. Here We Are is an ode to friendship and its wondrous ability to brighten our lives in unexpected ways. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today, and this new memoir pays tribute to his friend, in the way that only a writer can. Roth encouraged him to write this book, giving Taylor explicit instructions not to sugarcoat anything and not to publish it until after his death. Unvarnished and affectionately true to life, Taylor's memoir will be the definitive account of Philip Roth as he lived for years to come.

Other Men's Daughters

Other Men's Daughters PDF Author: Richard Stern
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810151464
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
The classic novel of a middle-aged man's affair with a worldly younger woman.

The Human Stain

The Human Stain PDF Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375726349
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
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). One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century 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."