Philip Roth

Portnoy's Complaint

by Philip Roth

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...

Letting Go

by Philip Roth

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...

When She Was Good

by Philip Roth

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...

Patrimony: A True Story

by Philip Roth

Patrimony, a true story, touches the emotions as strongly as anything Philip Roth has ever written. Roth watches as his eight-six-year-old father-famous for his vigor, his charm, and his repertoire of Newark...

Operation Shylock: A Confession

by Philip Roth

What if a lookalike stranger stole your name, usurped your biography and went around the world pretending to be you? In this tour de force of fact and fiction, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip...

Deception

by Philip Roth

"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...

Our Gang

by Philip Roth

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...

The Plot Against America: A Novel

by Philip Roth

When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only...

Indignation

by Philip Roth

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...

Everyman

PEN/Faulkner 2007

by Philip Roth

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...

Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work

by Philip Roth

In Philip Roth’s intimate intellectual encounters with an international and diverse cast of writers, they explore the importance of region, politics, and history in their work and trace the imaginative path...

The Dying Animal

by Philip Roth

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...

The Humbling

by Philip Roth

A haunting, incisive and honest new work of fiction from a legendary writer, told with Roth's inimitable urgency, bravura, and gravity, that strips off all the ways in which we persuade ourselves of our solidity....

Nemesis

by Philip Roth

A new novel by the legendary author.

Sabbath's Theater

National Book Award for Fiction 1995

by Philip Roth

He is relentlessly defiant. He is exceedingly libidinous. His appetite for the outrageous is insatiable. He is Mickey Sabbath, the aging, raging powerhouse whose savage effrontery and mocking audacity are at...

I Married a Communist

by Philip Roth

Radio actor Iron Rinn (born Ira Ringold) is a big Newark roughneck blighted by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. An idealistic Communist, a self-educated ditchdigger turned popular...

Exit Ghost

by Philip Roth

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...

The Human Stain: A Novel

PEN/Faulkner 2001

by Philip Roth

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...

American Pastoral

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1998

by Philip Roth

American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall - of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. Seymour "Swede" Levov - a legendary...

Goodbye Columbus

National Book Award for Fiction 1960

by Philip Roth

National Book Award Winner

Philip Roth's brilliant career was launched when the unknown twenty-five-year-old writer won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for a collection that was to be called Goodbye,...