Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Vintage
Keywords: complaint, portnoy
Number of Pages: 304
Published: 1994-09-20
List price: $14.95
ISBN-10: 0679756450
ISBN-13: 9780679756453

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 says: ’Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient’s "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.’ (Spielvogel, O. "The Puz

Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Vintage
Keywords: deception
Number of Pages: 208
Published: 1997-04-01
List price: $13.95
ISBN-10: 0679752943
ISBN-13: 9780679752943

"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

Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Keywords: stain, human
Number of Pages: 352
Published: 2000-04
List price: $26.00
ISBN-10: 0618059458
ISBN-13: 9780618059454

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, a woman half his age with a savagely wrecked past - a part-time farmhand and a janitor at the college where, until recently, he was the p

Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Vintage
Keywords: communist, married
Number of Pages: 336
Published: 1999-11-02
List price: $15.00
ISBN-10: 0375707212
ISBN-13: 9780375707216

I Married a Communist is the story of the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who begins life as a teenage ditch-digger in 1930s Newark, becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, and is destroyed, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s.In his heyday as a star—and as a zealous, bullying supporter of "progressive" political causes—Ira marries Hollywood’s beloved silent-film star, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon in her Manhattan townhouse is shortlived, however, and it is the publication of Eve’s scandalous bestselling exposé that

Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Vintage
Keywords: pastoral, american
Number of Pages: 432
Published: 1998-02-03
List price: $15.00
ISBN-10: 0375701427
ISBN-13: 9780375701429

As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century’s promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth’s protagonist is 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, ha

Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Vintage
Keywords: everyman
Number of Pages: 182
Published: 2007-04-10
List price: $13.00
ISBN-10: 0307277712
ISBN-13: 9780307277718

Philip Roth’s new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The bestselling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family’s harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) 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 his old age, when he is rended by observing the deteriorati

Author: Philip Roth
Publisher: Vintage
Keywords: america, plot
Number of Pages: 391
Published: 2005-09-27
List price: $15.95
ISBN-10: 1400079497
ISBN-13: 9781400079490

In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history. In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected President. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial “understanding” with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh’s election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America–and with it, his mother, his father, and his older brother.