ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY“It's not a prophecy; it's a nightmare. . . . [A] sinuous and brilliant book, with its extreme sweetness, its black pain, and its low, ceaseless cackle.” —The New Yorker“Huge, inflammatory, painfully moving. . . .Far and away the most outward-looking, expansive. . . book Roth has written." —The Washington Post Book World...

“One of the five best novels I have ever read, maybe the best. . . . It ranks with the greatest of American fiction." —Stephen King, The New York Times“An incandescent fiction. . . . Scintillates with more Rothian wit, paradox, eloquent tantrums, and absurd pitfalls than can be counted." —Los Angeles Times Book Review“The greatest of great American novels.” —Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The New York Times

Set in a Newark neighborhood during a terrifying polio outbreak, Nemesis is a wrenching examination of the forces of circumstance on our lives.Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944. A javelin thrower and weightlifter, he is disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As the devastating disease begins to ravage Bucky’...

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 a...

Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth’s startling new book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, "are melted into air, into thin air." When he goes onstage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His confidence in his powers has drained away; he imagines people laughing at him; he can no longer pret...

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 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 h...

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 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 ...

“[A] disturbing masterpiece.” —New York Review of Books"Powerful...Roth's narrator newly illuminates the American body, the American soul, the life of loving and the love of life that has always been so all-consuming in his fiction." — Chicago TribuneThe final, incendiary Kepesh novel and the unforgettable story of an affair between a star lecturer at a New York college and the beautiful daughter of Cuban exiles—a...

ONE OF THE THE ATLANTIC'S GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS OF THE PAST 100 YEARSPortnoy's Complaint scandalized-and forever changed-American literature." -The Washington Post“Deliciously funny . . . absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious . . . a brilliantly vivid reading experience”—The New York Times Book Review"The novel that made Roth a literary superstar, and it remains his most contro...

A wildy inventive sports satire following an imagined major-league baseball team comprised of indigent, elderly underdogs, written with "shameless comic extravagance" (New York Times) from Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth.The Ruppert Mundys, once the greatest baseball team in America, are now in a terminal decline, their line-up filled with a disreputable assortment of old men, drunks and even amputees. Around them baseball itself seems to be collapsing, ...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral delivers the astonishing story of the rise and fall of an American man whose life is destroyed in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s.I Married a Communist is the story 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.In his ...

The Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate.Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book’s evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the mind of th...