Like a latter-day Gregor Samsa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed. But where Kafka's protagonist turned into a giant beetle, the narrator of Philip Roth's richly conceived fantasy has become a 155-pound female breast. What follows is a deliriously funny yet touching exploration of the full implications of Kepesh's metamorphosisâ€”a daring, heretical book that brings us face to face with the intrinsic strangeness of sex and subjectivity.

The Breast

Literature & Fiction

ROTH, PHILIP

Literary

Holt, Rinehard and Winston

At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol, a gifted young writer and the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen's death, Peter is still trying-and failing-to write his way free of it. Out of desperate inventions and cauterizing truths, acts of weakness, tenderheartedness, and shocking cruelty, Philip Roth creates a work worthy of Strinberg-a fierce tragedy of sexual need and blindness.

My Life as a Man

Holt; Rinehart; Winston

Portnoy's Complaint

Unabridged on audio, read by Ron Silver and directed by the author, Philip Roth
Portnoy's Complaint is the famously outrageous confession made to his analyst by Alexander Portnoy, the Huck Finn of Newark, who is trust through life by his unappeasable sexuality, yet held back at the same time by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood. Thirty years after it was first published, Portnoy's Complaint remains a classic of American literature, a tour de force of comic and carnal brilliance, and probably the funniest book about sex ever written. It was recently designated one of the hundred best books of the twentieth century by the Modern Library judges.

United States

Caedmon

American Pastoral

Contemporary

Vintage

Coleman Silk has a secret. But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with a woman half his age. And it's not the secret of his alleged racism, which provoked the college witchhunt that cost him his job. Coleman's secret is deeper, and lies at the very core of who he is, and he has kept it hidden from everyone for fifty years. Set in 1998, with the backdrop of the impeachment of a president, "The Human Stain" shows us an America where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions result in public denunciations and houndings, and where innocence is not always a good enough excuse.

Human Stain

Random House UK Ltd.

'Disturbing, logical and very funny... In short, a masterpiece' New York Times Book Review A ferocious political satire in the great tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, Our Gang is Philip Roth's brilliantly acerbic response to the phenomenon of Richard M. Nixon. In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth portrays an American president who outdoes the severest cynic; a peace-loving Quaker and believer in the sanctity of human life who doesn't have a problem with killing unarmed women and children. A master politician with an honest sneer, he finds himself battling the Boy Scouts, declaring war on pro-pornography Denmark, all the time trusting in the basic indifference of the voting public. Tricky is the unprincipled self-seeker who hides his heartlessness behind the anaesthetising cliches of high office, whose public language is a merciless parody of that 'candid' Presidential prose which is merely double-talk, or as Orwell put it, 'pure wind'.

Our Gang: Starring Trick and His Friends

Comics & Graphic Novels

Graphic Novels

Vintage Books

The famous confession of Alexander Portnoy who is thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality, yet held back at the same time by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood.

Portnoy's Complaint (Vintage Blue)

Humor & Satire

RANDOM HOUSE UK

The Dying Animal

David Kepesh is a 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 1960's 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 had refined that exuberant decade of protest and licence into an orderly way of life in which he is both unimpeded 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, of 'volupte' - 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 deforming jealousy. The lighthearted erotic tale with which he began evolves into a poignant, tragic story of love and loss.

Genre Fiction

In Philip Roths 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 by which a writers highly individualised art is informed by the wider conditions of life. Milan Kundera and Czechoslova

Shop Talk : A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work

History & Criticism

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by ROTH, PHILIP. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by ROTH, PHILIP

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by ROTH, PHILIP. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Breast

My Life as a Man

Portnoy's Complaint

American Pastoral

Human Stain

Our Gang: Starring Trick and His Friends

Portnoy's Complaint (Vintage Blue)

The Dying Animal

Shop Talk : A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work

Portnoy's Complaint (Vintage Blue)