-select- TheBookReportNetwork.com BookReporter.com ReadingGroupGuides.com AuthorYellowPages.com Teenreads.com Kidsreads.com

About The Author Excerpt: Philip Roth   Hailed as one of the best contemporary fiction writers in America, Philip Roth has focused his considerable gifts on recording the modern Jewish experience. A satirist with a keen sense of humor and biting sarcasm, Roth has been both acerbically denounced by the Jewish religious establishment for anti-Semitism and honored by the literary elite for these explorations. Roth attained celebrity at the age of 26 with the publication of his first book, Goodbye Columbus, a National Book Award winner that was later turned into a popular film starring Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw. But it was with his fourth novel, Portnoy's Complaint, that both his fame and infamy were established. Called a "desperately dirty novel," Portnoy's Complaint depicts sexually explicit acts. The prepublication buzz about the book was so fierce that Roth earned close to a million dollars from magazine excerpts, long before the book itself hit the shelves. Roth's work is sometimes drawn so directly from his own life that the line between fiction and reality is fuzzy-a theme that he toys with in many of his novels. Of this, author Tobias Wolff says, "Roth's purpose in all this is not merely playful or cantankerous; what he means to do, and does, is make the strongest possible case for fiction's autonomy by suggesting and then repudiating its connection with 'the facts.' It's a nervy, sometimes hilarious, now and then exasperating performance; his road of excess doesn't always lead to the palace of wisdom. But often it does." Good to Know When Jacqueline Susann's novel The Love Machine was competing with Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (and its graphic depictions of masturbation) for top ranking on bestseller lists, Susann was asked her opinion of Roth. "He's a fine writer," she replied, "but I wouldn't want to shake hands with him." Critics tended to be less impressed by the post-Portnoy novels until Roth introduced his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, in The Ghost Writer (1979). Many critics consider this and the Zuckerman books that followed to be Roth's best work. In 1976, Roth became general editor of Writers from the Other Europe, a Penguin series that published works by authors living behind the Iron Curtain. He was motivated to take the job out of an intellectual debt to Franz Kafka. And speaking of Kafka…just as that Czech master turned his famous character Gregor Samsa into a beetle in The Metamorphosis, Roth transformed comp. lit. professor David Kepesh into a six-foot-long mammary gland in his novella, The Breast. John Gardner called the 78-page curiosity "inventive and sane and very funny, though filthy…. It's incredible, in fact, how smart [Roth] is for a man so hung up with his you-know-what." Writing as therapy: Following knee surgery in 1987, Roth suffered from severe depression. But he was able to "write myself out of it" with his widely praised memoir The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography. Roth received America's four major literary prizes with the successive publication of four books in the 1990s: Patrimony, National Book Critics Circle Award (1991); Operation Shylock, PEN/Faulkner Award (1993), Sabbath's Theater, National Book Award (1995); American Pastoral, Pulitzer Prize (1998). Treatises and Treats Autobiographies The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988). Roth gives a candid portrait of his life in this unconventional autobiography, concentrating on five emotional episodes. Patrimony: A True Story (1991, repr. Vintage Books, 1996). Chronicling his 86-year-old dad's struggle with a terminal brain tumor, Roth takes readers on a touching father-son journey in this witty, beautifully written memoir. Best of the Net New York Times Featured Authors www.nytimes.com/books/specials/author.html Click on "Philip Roth" for reviews of his books, personal interviews, articles by and about him, and interesting side notes, such as a piece by author William Styron recalling an unforgettable day he spent with Roth in Ireland called "Dear Dirty Dublin: My Joycean Trek With Philip Roth." Reading List Nathan Zuckerman Novels The Ghost Writer, 1979 Zuckerman Unbound, 1981 The Anatomy Lesson, 1983 Zuckerman Bound, 1985 (a trilogy including the three works listed above and an epilogue, The Prague Orgy) The Counterlife, 1986 (National Book Critics Circle Award) I Married a Communist, 1998 All the Other Novels Goodbye Columbus and Five Short Stories, 1959 (National Book Award) Letting Go, 1962 When She Was Good, 1967 Portnoy's Complaint, 1969 Our Gang, 1971 The Breast, 1972 The Great American Novel, 1973 My Life as a Man, 1974 The Professor of Desire, 1977 Deception, 1990 Operation Shylock: A Confession, 1993 (PEN/Faulkner Award) Sabbath's Theater, 1995 (National Book Award) American Pastoral, 1997 (Pulitzer Prize) If You Like Philip Roth… Try Bernard Malamud, another contemporary legend who captured Jewish culture with grace and humor. You might also like books by Saul Bellow and Bruce Jay Friedman. Other Excerpts top of page

contact us | about us | privacy policy