Philip Roth

Mickey Sabbath ist am Ende. Einst hat er als Puppenspieler die Zuschauer am Broadway entzückt, nun sind seine Finger steif uns arthritisch verkrümmt. Der Artist will sterben. In einem grellen Bilderbogen zieht sein Leben noch einmal vorbei, eine Abfolge von erotischen Niederlagen und vermeintlichen Triumphen, die seine überreizte Phantasie in allen Details ausmalt.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZEPhilip Roth’s masterpiece provides a piercing look into the promises of prosperity, civic order and domesticity in twentieth century America ‘Swede’ Levov is living the American dream. He glides through life cocooned by his devoted family, his demanding yet highly rewarding (and lucrative) business, his sporting prowess, his good looks. He is the embodiment of thriving, post-war America, land of liberty and hope. Until the sunny day in 1968, when the Swede’s bountiful American luck deserts him. The tragedy springs from devastatingly close to home. His adored daughter, Merry, has become a stranger to him, a fanatical teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism that plunges the Levov family into the political mayhem of sixties America, and drags them into the underbelly of a seemingly ascendant society. Rendered powerless by the shocking turn of events, the Swede can only watch as his pastoral idyll is methodically torn apart. Extraordinarily nuanced and poignant, American Pastoral is the first in an eloquent trilogy of post-war American novels and cemented Roth’s reputation as one of the greatest American novelists of the twentieth century.‘Full of insight, full of sharp ironic twists, full of wisdom about American idealism, and full of terrific fun... A profound and personal meditation on the changes in the American psyche over the last fifty years’ Financial Times

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). A Los Angeles Times Best Fiction Book of the Last 30 Years 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.

Patrimony, a true story, touches the emotions as strongly as anything Philip Roth has ever written. Roth watches as his 86-year-old father--famous for his vigor, charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections--battles with 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." A deeply resonant portrait of a father and son.... Roth has looked past all comfort and condolence to find the truth--about himself and his father; about death and the fear of it; and about the absolute vulnerability to which love condemns us all."--Chicago Tribune

A dazzling novel about a man and woman married to other people--and the riveting conversations that take place before and after they make love--from the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral. "This swift, elegant, disturbing novel...stands at the extreme of contemporary fiction." --The New York Times Book Review 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 book's 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 book, and all there needs to be.

'A work of near heroic vitality and cunning' Sunday TelegraphAt sixty-four Mickey Sabbath is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous;

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 Years Once 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.

The Prague Orgy, consisting of entries from protagonist Nathan Zuckerman's notebooks recording his sojourn among outcast artists, completes Roth's masterful trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman bound. It provides a startling ending to Roth's intricately designed magnum opus on the unforeseen consequences of art. This Vintage edition is the first paperback publication of the epilogue.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral--and one of the most renowned writers of the twentieth century--"a ferocious, heartfelt book" (The New Yorker) featuring Nathan Zuckerman whose life is about to unravel when he comes down with a mysterious affliction. "Roth has a genius for the comedy of entrapment.... He] writes America's most raucously funny novels." --Time At forty, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a terrible 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 Anatomy Lesson is a great comedy of illness written in what the English critic Hermione Lee has described as "a manner at once ... brash and thoughtful ... lyrical and wry, which projects through comic expostulations and confessions...a knowing, humane authority." The Anatomy Lesson provides some of the funniest scenes in all of Roth's fiction as well as some of the fiercest.

As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself as 'a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes' - an identity that will cling to him for a lifetime.

The novel that first introduced the Pulitzer Prize-winnning author's most acclaimed character, Nathan Zuckerman, a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, who meets a haunting young woman at the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol. "Further evidence that Roth can do practically anything with fiction. His narrative power--the ability to delight the reader simultaneously with the telling and the tale--is superb." --The Washington Post 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 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.

A "masterful" novel (The New York Times Book Review) from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral tells the story of a bestselling writer whose life is falling apart--all because of his great good fortune. 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?"), but he also finds himself the target of admonishers, advisers, and sidewalk literary critics. The recent murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., lead an unsettled Zuckerman to wonder if "target" may be more than a figure of speech. In Zuckerman Unbound, the notorious novelist Nathan Zuckerman retreats from his oldest friends, breaks his marriage to a virtuous woman, and damages, perhaps irreparably, his affectionate connection to his younger brother.

A richly imagined novel centered on the only homeless major league baseball team in American history, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral. "Roth invents baseball anew, as pure slapstick.... An awesome performance." --The New Republic - "Shameless comic extravagance."--The New York TimesGil 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 homeless baseball team the Ruppert Mundys--it's because of the Communist plot, and the capitalist scandal, that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory. In this ribald, 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.

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.

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner AwardIn Operation Shylock, 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 suspense, philosophical speculation, and a cast of characters that includes Israeli intelligence agents, Palestinian exiles, and an enticing charter member of an organization called Anti-Semites Anonymous, Operation Shylock barrels across the frontier between fact and fiction, history and nightmare.

Professor of Desire follows David Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a menage a trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York. Roth 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.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER - From the Pulitzer Prize-winnning writer of explosive wit, merciless insight, and a fierce compassion comes "a masterpiece" (Newsweek) that illuminates the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora. Roth's award-winning first book instantly established its author's reputation. 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.

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."[My Life as a Man is] a scalding, unique addition to the lasting literature about men and women."--Newsday

The Ruppert Mundy's, once the great baseball team in America, are now in a terminal decline, their line-up filled with a disreputable assortment of old men, drunks and even amputees. In this novel, the author turns his attention to one of the most beloved of all American rituals: baseball.