Philip Roth

American Pastoral

432 pages

American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel published in 1997 concerning 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".

Everyman

Published 2007-04-10 · 182 pages

"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.

Goodbye, Columbus

Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories

248 pages

Dramatizations of aspects of American life seen through the comic or tragic predicament of American Jews.

I Married a Communist

344 pages

Radio actor Iron Rinn is a big Newark roughneck lighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. An idealistic Communist, an uneducated ditchdigger turned popular performer, a six-foot, six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he emerges from serving in WW2 passionately committed to making the world a better place and winds up instead blacklisted and unemployable, his life in ruins. I Married a Communist is the story of Iron Rinns denunciation and disgrace.

My Life as a Man

334 pages

Contains three stories: an autobiographical narrative told by the author Peter Tarnopol and two of Peter's stories, "Useful Fictions."

Operation Shylock

Operation Shylock: A Confession

Patrimony

240 pages

In a moving elegy, one of America's most powerful writers recreates his father's ordeal as, suffering from a brain tumor, he battles with the ignominy and helplessness of old age.

Sabbath's Theater

458 pages

"As much as he wants to be the Marquis de Sade, he is not. As much as he wants to be seventeen, he is not. As much as he wants to be dead, he is not. He is Mickey Sabbath, the aging, raging powerhouse whose savage effrontery and mocking audacity are at the heart of Philip Roth's new novel.".

The Anatomy Lesson

291 pages

The Counterlife

328 pages

Stories of people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, ranging from a quiet suburban New Jersey dentist to a genteel Englishwoman and an Israeli settlement leader.

The Ghost Writer

179 pages

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.

The Human Stain

392 pages

In 1990's America, the Human Stain is the story told by Nathan Zuckerman, a writer who lives a secluded life until the aging classics professor Coleman Silk becomes his new neighbor.

The Plot Against America

400 pages

The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The novel follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more accepted in American life and Jewish-American families like the Roths are persecuted on various levels.

The Professor of Desire

263 pages

David Kapesh, an adventurous man of intelligence and feeling, tries to make his way to both pleasure and dignity through a world of sensual possiblities.

Zuckerman Unbound

225 pages

Zuckerman, dogged by personal neuroses and ill-health, has to contend with a tough television celebrity, who accuses him of plagiarising his personal life, whilst watching his father's terminal illness move towards its sad conclusion.