Philip Roth
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
This novel follows Seymour "Swede" Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk"; the author investigates the century's most divisive...
3) Everyman
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
The hero of Everyman is obsessed with mortality. As he reminds himself at one point, "I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion when you're seventy-five." But he cannot help himself. He is the ex-husband in three marriages gone wrong. He is the father of two sons who detest him, despite a daughter who adores him. And as his health worsens, he is the envious brother of a much fitter man.
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Coleman Silk is a respected professor at a New England college who suddenly finds his life unraveling after a comment he makes about some African-American students is misinterpreted as a racial slur. As the scandal heats up, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer researching a biography of Silk, begins to dig deeply into Silk's life. Eventually, matters are made worse when Coleman's affair with a young married janitor named Faunia Farley is exposed. But amid...
5) Indignation
Author
Language
English
Description
What impact can American history have on the life of the vulnerable individual? 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...
7) Nemesis
Author
Series
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
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.
10) Exit ghost
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
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...
11) The humbling
Author
Language
English
Description
What happens when all the ways that we convince ourselves of our solidity, all our life's performances--talent, love, sex, hope, energy, reputation--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...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Contains the title work in which a Radcliffe girl and a Rutgers boy learn about life; and includes five additional short stories by the award-winning American author. '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...
13) The dying animal
Author
Series
Kepesh novels volume 3
Language
English
Description
David Kepesh is white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college, when he meets Consuela Castillo, a decorous, well-mannered student of twenty-four, the daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who promptly puts his life into erotic disorder.
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 reach...
14) The ghost writer
Author
Series
Zuckerman novels volume 1
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
An aspiring young writer visits the peaceful country home of his literary idol and discovers a hotbed of suppressed emotions and disappointments and discovers love with the legendary Anne Frank, or so he thinks.
15) My life as a man
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Roth bears witness to the lives of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol--a writer and his would-be muse--whose marriage imprisons two tortured souls.
Author
Series
Zuckerman novels volume 2
Language
English
Formats
Description
"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...
17) The counterlife
Author
Series
Zuckerman novels volume 5
Language
English
Formats
Description
Now Nathan's married brother, Henry the dentist, is suffering from impotence as a result of taking heart medication--and he's willing to risk his life in a dangerous operation just to regain his sexual prowess in order to satisfy the needs of his office assistant.
18) Our Gang
Author
Publisher
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Pub. Date
2009
Language
English
Formats
Description
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral comes a brilliantly indignant response to the phenomenon that was Richard M. Nixon. • “Disturbing, logical...and very funny.... In short, a masterpiece" —The New York Times Book Review
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...
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...
Author
Series
Zuckerman novels volume 3
Language
English
Formats
Description
Plagued by a debilitating, seemingly undiagnosable ailment, the great author Nathan Zuckerman is living out his middle-aged years on his back under the care of his harem. He can't write or type without spasms of pain shooting through his neck and shoulders, yet doctors by the hundreds are unable to offer an effective treatment. Could this pain be his penance for writing the indecent "Carnovsky?" Zuckerman ponders this as he puffs his joint before...