In the balance of personal, domestic and national events, the novel is one of Roth's most deft creations....Roth's writing has never been so direct and accessible while retaining its stylistic precision and acute insights into human f...

Iron Rinn (ne Ira Ringold) is a self-educated radio actor, married to a spoilt, rags-to-riches beauty, silent-film star Eve Frame (nee Chave Fromkin). He is a Communist, and a 'sucker for suffering,' locked into the cycle of violenc...

Roth’s debut book, a novella and short stories about Jews in contemporary America, won a National Book Award in 1959 and established him as an important writer. While his insight into the Jewish-American experience won him a lar...

In this mesmerizing, funny, chilling novel, the setting is a small town in the 1940s Midwest, the subject the heart of a wounded and ferociously moralistic young woman, one of those implacable American moralists whose "goodness i...

It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. Marcus Messner of Newark, New Jersey is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative Winesburg College in Ohio. Why is he here? Because his father, a hard-working...

Mickey Sabbath, an aging, misanthropic puppeteer, embarks on a journey into his checkered past when his long-time mistress dies. His journey turns into succession of disasters. And while Sabbath wants to die, he still has too much lif...

Like a latter-day, Gregor Smasa, 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 be...

"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...

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 pe...

As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself "a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes." Little does he realize how prophetic this motto will be—or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domest...