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...

The Facts is the unconventional autobiography of a writer who has reshaped our idea of fiction—a work of compelling candor and inventiveness, instructive particularly in its revelation of the interplay between life and art.Philip Ro...

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...

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...

Gil Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire. The ex-con first baseman John Baal, "The Babe Ruth of the Big House," who never hit a homerun sober. If you've never heard of them—or of the Ruppert...

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...