Philip Roth

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Connecticut

In a novel of alternative history, aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election, negotiating an accord with Adolf Hitler and accepting his conquest of Europe and anti-Semitic policies.

The Plot Against America EX LIB

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The Plot Against America

#paperback #fiction #philiproth #americanpastoral  #book1 #americantrilogy

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Ohio

American Trilogy (1)

The rise and fall of the American Dream provide the backdrop for the story of Swede Levov, a prosperous New Jersey man and grandson of immigrants, whose fanatical daughter bombs a post office in 1968. Reprint. 100,000 first printing.

American Pastoral

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New Jersey

American Trilogy (3)

A college professor with a sexual indiscretion in his past is hounded from his job by academic enemies who label him a racist.

The Human Stain

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Louisiana

A New York lawyer, dominated by a demanding Jewish mother, plays out a sexual revenge in fact and fantasy

Portnoy's Complaint

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Colorado

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * Sabbath's Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is its gargantuan hero.

"Roth's richest, most rewarding novel ... funny and profound ... as powerful as writing can be." --The New York Times Book Review

Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his long-time mistress--an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring surpassed even his own--Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.

Sabbath's Theater

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The death of his mistress sends Mickey Sabbath, an audacious libertine and onetime puppeteer, on a psychic journey into his past, in a comic novel by the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of Operation Shylock. National ad/promo.

Saul Bellow

Texas

In one of his finest achievements, Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow presents a multifaceted portrait of a modern-day hero, a man struggling with the complexity of existence and longing for redemption. A Penguin Classic This is the story of Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, joker, mourner, and charmer. Although his life steadily disintegrates around him—he has failed as a writer and teacher, as a father, and has lost the affection of his wife to his best friends—Herzog sees himself as a survivor, both of his private disasters and those of the age. He writes unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, revealing his wry perception of the world and the innermost secrets of his heart. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by Philip Roth.

Herzog

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Illinois

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 deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes.The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.

Everyman

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A successful commercial artist with three very different ex-wives, a daughter who adores him, and two sons who despise him, the protagonist finds his confidence, sense of independence, and well-being undermined by an attack of illness in middle age. 100,000 first printing.

Watts Books

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 neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad -- mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy.

As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father’s fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.

Indignation, Philip Roth’s twenty-ninth book, is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage, and error. It is a story told with all the inventive energy and wit Roth has at his command, at once a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in his recent books and a powerful addition to his investigations of the impact of American history on the life of the vulnerable individual.

Indignation

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National Bestseller. Now a major motion picture, directed by James Schamus!

In 1951, the second year of the Korean War, a studious, law-abiding, and intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, begins his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at a local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hardworking neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad- mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy. Far from Newark, Marcus has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.

Indignation, Philip Roth's twenty-ninth book, is a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in Roth's recent books and a powerful exploration of a remarkable moment in American history.

New York

And Five Short Stories

A Radcliffe undergraduate and a Newark public library employee engage in a summer romance

Goodbye, Columbus

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I rated this as fair because it does have some notes in it. Most are in pencil. 

Missouri

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Set in a close-knit Newark neighborhood during a terrifying polio outbreak in 1944, a “book [that] has the elegance of a fable and the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama” (The New Yorker)—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral. 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’s playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain. Moving between the streets of Newark and a pristine summer camp high in the Poconos, Nemesis tenderly and startlingly depicts Cantor’s passage into personal disaster, the condition of childhood, and the painful effect that the wartime polio epidemic has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.

Nemesis

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Roth's "Nemesis" is the story of a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children.

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 of wealthy Cuban exiles, who promptly puts his life into erotic disorder and haunts him for the next eight years. Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s freed him from his wife and child, Kepesh has experimented with living what he calls an 'emancipated manhood' beyond the reach of family or a mate. Over the years, he has refined that exuberant decade of protest and licence into an orderly way of life in which he is bothunimpeded in the world of Eros and studiously devoted to his aesthetic pursuits. But the youth and beauty of this 'newly-hatched' woman - 'a masterpiece,' as Kepesh describes Consuela, 'ofvolupte' - undo him completely. His worldliness, his confidence, his reason desert him, and on the brink of old age, a maddening sexual possessiveness transports him to the depths of defonning jealousy. The light-hearted erotic tale with which he began evolves into a poignant, tragic story of love and loss. The Dying Animal is vintage Roth fiction, a masterpiece of passionate immediacy. It is intellectually bold, forcefully candid, wholly of our time, and utterly without precedent - a story of sexual discovery told about himself by a man of seventy.

The Dying Animal

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No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you’re not superior to sex. With these words our most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college–as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete’s critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.

The agency of Kepesh’s undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous and humblingly beautiful 24-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged–helplessly, bitterly, furiously–into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling this descent, Philip Roth performs a breathtaking set of variations on the themes of eros and mortality, license and repression, selfishness and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.

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. If she were, it might change his life.

The first volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The Ghost Writer is about the tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency--and about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other.

The Ghost Writer

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Fictional story of an American roughneck who begins life as a ditch digger as a teen and becomes a radio star and is destroyed as a performer and man by McCarthy’s witch hunts in the 1950’s

American Trilogy (2)

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 identifies him as "an American taking his orders from Moscow."

In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge spilling over into the public arena from their origins in Ira's turbulent personal life, Philip Roth--who Commonweal calls the "master chronicler of the American twentieth century--has written a brilliant fictional protrayal of that treacherous postwar epoch when the anti-Communist fever not only infected national politics but traumatized the intimate, innermost lives of friends and families, husbands and wives, parents and children.

I Married a Communist

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Hardcover copy of Operation Shylock by Philip Roth

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Oklahoma

A Confession

In this fiendishly imaginative, dizzyingly paced bestseller, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Someone with that name has been touring the State of Israel, promoting a bizarre exodus in reverse, and it is up to Roth to stop him--even if that means impersonating his impersonator.

Operation Shylock

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"What if a look-alike stranger stole your name, usurped your biography, and went about the world pretending to be you?" "In his extraordinary new book, his most ingenious and original work since Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth confronts his double, an impostor whose self-appointed task is to lead the Jews out of Israel and back to Europe, a Moses in reverse and a monstrous nemesis to the "real" Philip Roth." "Suspenseful, hilarious, hugely impassioned, pulsing with intelligence and narrative energy, Operation Shylock is at once a spy story, a political thriller, a meditation on identity, and a confession." "This master novelist has never been more demonically brilliant than in the re-creation of his frightening and mysterious journey through the volatile Middle East. Operation Shylock is Philip Roth's twentieth published book - and perhaps his very best."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The Professor of Desire

The interviews, essays, and articles collected here span a quarter century of Philip Roth's distinguished career and "reveal [a] preoccupation with the relationship between the written and the unwritten world." Here is Roth on himself and his work and the controversies it's engendered. Here too are Roth's writings on the Eastern European writers he has always championed; and on baseball, American fiction, and American Jews. The essential collection of nonfiction by a true American master, Reading Myself and Others features his long interview with the Paris Review.

Reading Myself and Others

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral comes the story of a leading American stage actor who's lost his magic but finds deliverance in the form of a vibrant, ever-subversive, much younger woman.

"A taut and controlled fever-dream that demands to be experienced at a single sitting" --Los Angeles Times

Simon Axler, one of the leading American stage actors of his generation, is now in his sixties and has lost his magic, talent, and assurance. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, "are melted into air, into thin air." When his wife leaves him, and after a stint at a mental hospital, he retires to his upstate New York country house and hopes for salvation, which arrives in the form of the lithe Pegeen Stapleford, the daughter of old friends and 25 years his junior.

In this tight, surprising narrative told with Roth's inimitable urgency, bravura, and gravity, we confront the terrifying fragility of all our life's performances.

The Humbling

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Previously owned.  Minor edge wear, cover and corner wear.

Pennsylvania

Exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, Roth presents in Deception the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction. At the center of the novel are Philip and his lover, an Englishwoman compromised by a humiliating marriage, and the conversation that ensues before and after making love.

Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Deception

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Good condition copy. A lean to the page block but otherwise tight and clean. 

Maine

The Anatomy Lesson

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In 1973, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer who has lost the ability to create, attempts to console himself with women as he decides to abandon writing and become a doctor. Reprint.

Richard Stern

Wendy Doniger

Richard G. Stern

A middle-aged Harvard professor with a marriage gone sour falls in love with a young student and goes through the trauma of a divorce.

Other Men's Daughters

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For almost six years the Merriwethers of Cambridge have been living a lie. They still share the old house on Acorn Street- wooden, gabled, bellied with bay windows. Nights they can be found gathered in the parlor, reading in their favorite roosts. The children, intelligent, aware; Sarah, bright agreeable; Robert Merriwether, "the helpless man of thought." One summer changes the direction of their lives. Sarah has taken the children to Maine, but for the first time in years Merriwether stays behind in Cambridge to work. A doctor and physiologist, it has been two years since he's done work that has absorbed him. That summer, he eats alone, plays tennis occasionally or rows on the Charles, reads books that he hasn't looked at since his youth and takes walks. His energy turns inward and Merriweather finds Cynthia Ryder, a young summer student who renews his passion and helps him to redefine his life. Other Men's Daughters explores the theme that men are most alike in their most passionate times, but that most men diffuse the passions that first sustained them.

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Massachusetts

The Counterlife

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Novelist Nathan Zuckerman challenges the many schemes concocted by people around him for reversing their seemingly irreversible destinies

Fading on spine of dust jacket (see photos)

Minnesota

After he is transformed into a 155-pound female breast, college professor David Kepesh struggles to rationalize his condition by proving he is insane.

The Breast

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From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral: Like a latter-day Gregor Samsa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed—into a 155-pound breast. What follows is “terrific…inventive and sane and very funny (The New York Times Book Review). A deliriously funny yet touching exploration of the full implications of David Kepesh's metamorphosis—a daring, heretical book that brings us face to face with the intrinsic strangeness of sex and subjectivity. "Hilarious, serious, visionary, logical, sexual-philosophical; the ending amazes—the joke takes three steps beyond savagery and satire and turns into a sublimeness of pity. One knows when one is reading something that will permanently enter the culture." —Cynthia Ozick, author of Antiquities

Collected Nonfiction 1960-2014

America’s most celebrated writer returns with a definitive edition of his essential statements on literature, his controversial novels, and the writing life, including including six pieces published here for the first time and many others newly revised. Throughout a unparalleled literary career that includes two National Book Awards (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959 and Sabbath’s Theater, 1995), the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (American Pastoral, 1997), the National Book Critics Circle Award (The Counterlife, 1986), and the National Humanities Medal (awarded by President Obama in 2011), among many other honors, Philip Roth has produced an extraordinary body of nonfiction writing on a wide range of topics: his own work and that of the writers he admires, the creative process, and the state of American culture. This work is collected for the first time in Why Write?, the tenth and final volume in the Library of America’s definitive Philip Roth edition. Here is Roth’s selection of the indispensable core of Reading Myself and Others, the entirety of the 2001 book Shop Talk, and “Explanations,” a collection of fourteen later pieces brought together here for the first time, six never before published. Among the essays gathered are “My Uchronia,” an account of the genesis of The Plot Against America, a novel grounded in the insight that “all the assurances are provisional, even here in a two-hundred-year-old democracy”; “Errata,” the unabridged version of the “Open Letter to Wikipedia” published on The New Yorker’s website in 2012 to counter the online encyclopedia’s egregious errors about his life and work; and “The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction,” a speech delivered on the occasion of his eightieth birthday that celebrates the “refractory way of living” of Sabbath’s Theater’s Mickey Sabbath. Also included are two lengthy interviews given after Roth’s retirement, which take stock of a lifetime of work. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Philip Roth: Why Write? (LOA #300)

A True Story

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

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Philip Roth

The Plot Against America

Philip Roth

American Pastoral

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The Human Stain

Philip Roth

Portnoy's Complaint

Philip Roth

Sabbath's Theater

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Herzog

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Everyman

Philip Roth

Indignation

Philip Roth

Goodbye, Columbus

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Nemesis

Philip Roth

The Dying Animal

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The Ghost Writer

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I Married a Communist

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Operation Shylock

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The Professor of Desire

Philip Roth

Reading Myself and Others

Philip Roth

The Humbling

Philip Roth

Deception

Philip Roth

The Anatomy Lesson

Richard Stern

Other Men's Daughters

Philip Roth

The Counterlife

Philip Roth

The Breast

Philip Roth

Philip Roth: Why Write? (LOA #300)

Philip Roth

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