Philip Roth

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

Philip Roth's bestselling alternate history—the chilling story of what happens to one family when America elects a charismatic, isolationist president.

In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election

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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 to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality. 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...

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 his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret. But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with Faunia Farley,...

In 1944 Newark, devoted playground director Bucky Cantor, sidelined from the war due to his poor eyesight, watches in horror as the city's polio epidemic begins to ravage the children on his playground.

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 performer, a six-foot six-inch Abe Lincoln look-alike, he marries the nation's reigning radio actress and beloved silent-film star, the exquisite Eve Frame (born Chava Fromkin). Their marriage evolves from a glamorous, romantic idyll into...

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...

Made early in Roth's career, this is from his first novel, Letting Go. Set in the 1950s, it portrays the social constraints of the period as they affect several graduate students at critical points in their lives. The scene Roth reads shows the rather diffident Paul Herz confronted by two of his ancient rooming-house neighbors who have a favor to ask. As the critic John Ciardi wrote, "Three actors with separately trained voices could not have read...

The finale to Roth's Zuckerman trilogy. Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious physical affliction - pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his life. His work was his life, but now his work is trekking from one doctor to the next.

Gill Gamesh is the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire. The ex-con first baseman, John Baal never hit a home run sober. In this satiric novel, baseball's status as national pastime and myth is turned into an occasion for farce, with a cast of characters that includes the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Cultural critic David Kepesh finds his state of 'emancipated manhood' thrown into tragic disarray. David is a renowned college professor whose life is turned inside out when he becomes involved in a passionate relationship with Consuela. Consuela is a well-mannered student who awakens a sense of sexual possessiveness in her teacher. As their sexual relationship evolves, an incredible love story is born.