A flatlay of some of James Baldwin's most notable works. 

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Reading lists

Where to start with Philip Roth

For writers, weddings are the perfect settings to create high drama

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The greatest wedding scenes in fiction

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What to read after The Handmaid’s Tale

The Human Stain

New to Vintage Classics, this is Roth’s brilliant conclusion to his eloquent trilogy of post-war America – a magnificent successor to American Pastoral and I Married a Communist

The Human Stain pulses with the strengths that make Roth a prime contender for the status of the most impressive novelist now writing in and about America

One of his very best... There are passages of such sustained brilliance here that I found myself going over them again and again in gaping disbelief. An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand

A novel so furious in its telling, with a plot so intricate in its construction that it is infused with a kind of diabolic joy. A masterpiece

[A] tender, shocking and incendiary story on the failure of the American dream refracted through the prism of race

One of the most beautiful books I've ever read

Philip Roth was one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century. Born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. He attended Bucknell University,Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, receiving a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature. 
 
In 1959, Roth published his first book Goodbye, Columbus for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success. Roth was the author of thirty-one books through which he explored and gave voice to the complexities of the American experience in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. 
 
Roth’s lasting contribution to literature was widely recognised throughout his lifetime, both in the US and abroad. Among other commendations he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the International Man Booker Prize, twice the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively. 
 
Philip Roth died on 22 May 2018 at the age of eighty-five.

The American psyche is channelled into the gripping story of one man. This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Philip Roth at his very best. 
 
It is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president. In a small New England town a distinguished professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues allege that he is a racist. The charge is unfounded, the persecution needless, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret that he has kept for fifty years. This is the conclusion to Roth’s brilliant trilogy of post-war America – a story of seismic shifts in American history and a personal search for renewal and regeneration. 
 
'An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand' Sunday Telegraph

American Pastoral

The renowned Pulitzer Prize-Winning novel

New to Vintage Classics, this is the Pulitzer-prize winning novel that exposed the American psyche. Still profoundly resonant today, it confirmed Philip Roth as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.

Full of insight, full of sharp ironic twists, full of wisdom about American idealism, and full of terrific fun... A profound and personal meditation on the changes in the American psyche over the last fifty years

A tragedy of classical proportions...a magnificent novel

Brilliantly written...angry, grieving, witty, acute...compellingly and convincingly rendered

Utterly tragic and compelling. It's one of the greatest modern American novels

[American Pastoral’s] mix of sly humour and incendiary passages that expose the dark heart of the American dream

A True Story

Patrimony

Reissued in electric new backlist style, Patrimony is a true story about the relationship between a father and a son.

Nobody writes about the American family with more tenderness and honesty

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away - with words. But the Lord giveth back, miraculously, in the form of this book and this family history

A true story, told with all the powerful authority and cunning narrative order of a major writer

His best work since The Counterlife

An extraordinary book about what it is to know a father

Roth masterfully creates a remarkable portrait of a life that, seen from the outside, does not seem singular or remarkable, but which Roth turns into something deeply emblematic about the last American century… a literary tour-de-force

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature. 
 
In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus – a collection of stories, and a novella – for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of America’s finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave voice to the complexities of the American experience in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. 
 
Roth’s lasting contribution to literature was widely recognised throughout his lifetime, both in the US and abroad. Among other commendations he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the International Man Booker Prize, twice the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively. 
 
Philip Roth died on 22 May 2018 at the age of eighty-five having retired from writing six years previously.

Patrimony is a true story about the relationship between a father and a son. 
 
Philip Roth watches as his eight-six-year-old father, famous for his vigour, his charm and his skill as a raconteur - lovingly called 'the Bard of Newark' - battles with the brain tumour that will kill him. The son, full of love, anxiety and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father's long engagement with life. Written with fierce tenderness, Patrimony is a classic work of memoir by a master storyteller.

The Great American Novel

Philip Roth's entire oeuvre – 31 books – to be reissued in electric new Vintage jackets for October 2016

Roth invents baseball anew, as pure slapstick... An awesome performance

Roth is one of a handful of living American novelists who can be called great

Roth is better than he's ever been before... The prose is electric

The Ruppert Mundys, once the greatest baseball team in America, are now in a terminal decline, their line-up filled with a disreputable assortment of old men, drunks and even amputees. Around them baseball itself seems to be collapsing, brought down by a bizarre mixture of criminality, stupidity, and The Great Communist Conspiracy, aimed at the very heart of the American way of life. 
 
In this hilarious and wonderfully eccentric novel Philip Roth turns his attention to one of the most beloved of all American rituals: baseball. Players, tycoons and the paying public are all targets as Roth satirises the dense tapestry of myths and legends that have grown up around The Great American Pastime.

Deception

This swift, elegant, disturbing novel...stands at the extreme of contemporary fiction

Deception is itself deceptive, as elegant and ingenious as anything in The Ghost Writer or The Prague Orgy

An amazing feast... He's invented the purest speech, the most convincing cadences, of any American novelist

A fiendishly clever piece of work...an amazing feat... He's invented the purest speech, the most convincing cadences, of any American novelist

'This swift, elegant, disturbing novel...stands at the extreme of contemporary fiction' New York Times Book Review 
 
He is a middle-aged American writer called Philip; she is an articulate, well-educated Englishwoman trapped in a loveless and humiliating marriage. In Philip's London studio, this play of voices - sharp, tender and inquiring - reveals both their past lives with startling clarity. Deception is fiendishly clever, as it dances with the conventions of the novel, and redefines the boundaries between fiction and reality.

Sabbath's Theater

Reissued in electric new backlist style, Sabbath's Theater is Philip Roth's astounding masterpiece

In time this will be seen as Roth's best novel

For me, the book of the year - maybe the decade - is Sabbath's Theater...funny...moving, imaginative, deep... A masterpiece

Sabbath explodes some mad genie out of his bottle... Sabbath's Theater has more firestorming prose than any other novel I have read this year

A work of near-heroic vitality and cunning

Absolutely filthy book with one of the most unpleasantly priapic and desperate anti-heroes in modern literature. A delight

This is the first of Roth’s late masterworks, and the most powerful

'A work of near heroic vitality and cunning' Sunday Telegraph 
 
At sixty-four Mickey Sabbath is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous; sex is an obsession and a principle, an instrument of perpetual misrule in his daily existence. 
 
But after the death of his long-time mistress - an erotic free spirit whose great taste for the impermissible matches his own - Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, tormented by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction... 
 
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Nemesis

The stunning final novel from the great Philip Roth, now reissued in electric new backlist style

A mesmerically imagined work of realism... A shocking gem... A masterclass in literature and life, that reaches into the pits of the dead

What makes Roth such an important novelist is the effortless way he brings together the trivial and the profoundly serious

Nemesis is an artfully constructed suspenseful novel with a cunning twist

The genius of Philip Roth...back at his imperious best in this heartbreaking tale... The eloquence of Roth's storytelling makes Nemesis one of his most haunting works

Cantor is one of Roth's best creations and the atmosphere of terror is masterfully fashioned

A perfectly proportioned Greek tragedy played out against the background of the polio epidemic that swept Newark, New Jersey, during the summer of 1944

It's the sweltering summer of 1944, and Newark is in the grip of a terrifying epidemic. 
 
 Decent, athletic twenty-three year old playground director Bucky Cantor is devoted to his charges and ashamed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As polio begins to ravage Bucky's playground - child by helpless child - Roth leads us through every emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering and the pain. 
 
 'The genius of Philip Roth...back at his imperious best in this heartbreaking tale... The eloquence of Roth's storytelling makes Nemesis one of his most haunting works' Daily Mail 
 
 'Cantor is one of Roth's best creations and the atmosphere of terror is masterfully fashioned' Sunday Telegraph 
 
 'Very fine, very unsettling' Douglas Kennedy, The Times

The Humbling

A literary colossus, whose ability to inspire, astonish and enrage his readers is undiminished'

There is a clarity, almost a ruthlessness, to his work, which makes the experience of reading any of his books a bracing, wild ride... He is the last of the giants

Roth...knows no limits, which is part of the fun of reading him

While the other big beasts of his literary generation lost it one by one, Roth has enjoyed a flowering of late form barely seen since Yeats.

Roth is no longer a novelist of comic exuberance, but of thoughtful meditation about life and increasingly death; he is our surviving laureate of lateness. His new work will not detain you long, but it will linger

The great man of American literature still flashes with brilliance

His most savage and unrelenting work yet... (Roth) has lost neither his voice nor his power to shock

Roth's late prodigious burst of creativity continues

Slim, fast-moving, sometimes funny but mostly bleak read...original and unsettling

Adds to his reputation as one of American literature's greats

Simon Axler is one of America's leading classical stage actors, but his talent - his magic - has deserted him. All the spontaneity and unthinking impulsiveness that made him great has been replaced by a paralysing self-consciousness. Overwhelmed, Axler's wife promptly leaves him, and Axler checks into a psychiatric hospital. It is only when he begins an affair with Pegeen - formerly a lesbian of 17 years - that Axler's regeneration (and then his final catastrophe) can begin.

Indignation

Now a major motion picture starring Sarah Gadon, Logan Lerman and Ben Rosenfield, and adapted for the screen by James Schamus

Intricately wrought, passionate and fascinating... A late masterpiece

In Indignation, his power and intensity seem undiminished

He is a writer of quite extraordinary skill and courage

I relished Indignation. Roth writes with his trademark drive and fluency, on the knife blade between rage and laughter

Roth reasserts his fictional mastery with a fine taut narrative about the frustrations of youth...every part of it is dovetailed into a story of compelling economy...a mid-20th-century tale of nemesis with all the intellectual and imaginative force of a great novelist writing at the height of his powers

A gratifying novel... Indignation is, unquestionably, seriously "good" Roth

Roth's novels abound in comic moments, and so does Indignation...His powerful new novel seethes with outrage...a deft, gripping, and deeply moving narrative

Indignation ought to be required reading for presidential candidates

Indignation is, among its many pleasures, a controlled expression of wrath

If I had to choose one word to sum up Indignation I'd go for classy. If were allowed two: very classy

Now a major motion picture starring Sarah Gadon, Logan Lerman and Ben Rosenfield, and adapted for the screen by James Schamus 
 
During the second year of the Korean War in 1951, studious, law-abiding Marcus Messner is beginning his sophomore year on the conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. Marcus has fled from his hometown of Newark, New jersey, trying to escape his father's oppressive love - a love that is also a mad fear of the dangers of adult life soon to face his son. Whilst at college, Marcus has to traverse an American world that isn't his own: facing off against ardent Christian, Dean Cauldwell, and falling in love with the beautiful Olivia Hutton. Indignation gleams with narrative muscle, as it twists and turns unpredictably, and extends - shockingly - beyond the confines of natural life.

A Novelist's Autobiography

The Facts

Reissued in electric new backlist style, The Facts is Philip Roth's idiosyncratic memoir

The Facts is a lively and serious version of a novelist's life

A fine account of the origin of Roth's fiction - Philip Roth continues to be the most vigorous and truthful of American writers

How does a novelist write about the facts of his life after spending years fictionalising those facts with irrepressible daring and originality? 
 
What becomes of 'the facts' after they have been smelted down for art's sake? In The Facts - Philip Roth's idiosyncratic autobiography - we find out. Focusing on five episodes in his life, Roth gives a portrait of his secure city childhood in Newark, through to his first marriage, clashes with the Jewish establishment over Goodbye, Columbus and his writing of Portnoy's Complaint. In true Rothian style, his fictional self Nathan Zuckerman is allowed the final, coruscating word of reply.

Exit Ghost

Reissued in electric new backlist style, Exit Ghost is the final book in Philip Roth's famous Nathan Zuckerman series

There are few writers who write with such power of the loss of powers

If its subject embraces mortality, its sentences ring with vitality, and Roth reminds us why "the transforming exigencies of prose fiction" still matter even as the light begins to die

Taken together the Zuckermam novels read as both a noisy New Jersey Kaddish for 50 years of American History and an extraordinary contemporary "Song of Myself"

At his best, Philip Roth constructs his novels from huge blocks of material, to produce an effect that is overpowering

Here is a noble revelation of the curel vulnerability of the body we live in without choice

Consistently enthralling...full of tart humour and dancing intelligence

Nobody who has followed him - one of the great writers of our time - thus far, should miss it

There is something magnificent about Philip Roth's undimmed rage and life-lust... As a body of work, these novels may have changed the way that readers think about their own mortality and may also have enlarged their sense of what it means to be a man; and one hopes that even E.I. Lonoff might consider that a fair tribute to the power of art

This is a book about the importance of literature that lasts

Returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman - incontinent and impotent - comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Walking the streets he quickly makes several connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. In a rash moment, he offers to swap homes with a young couple. And from the moment he meets them, Zuckerman wants to exchange his solitude for the erotic allure of the young woman Jamie, who draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, and the play of heart and body. 
 
Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.

My Life as a Man

A very grand work...in invention, in perception...in coming to grips with the wild inconsistencies of life and art

Roth's best... No writer alive can sustain a full-length novel at as high a decibel level as Philip Roth'

A scalding, unique addition to the lasting literature about men and women

A fiction-within-a-fiction, My Life as a Man centres on the fraught marriage of Peter, a gifted young writer and Maureen Tarnopol, the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead becomes his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and powered by moral blackmail. And yet, the the couple's relationship 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 scorching truths, acts of weakness and shocking cruelty, Philip Roth creates a fierce tragedy about a fatal impasse between a man and a woman.

Everyman

Reissued in electric new backlist style, Everyman is one of Philip Roth's late masterpieces and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Shimmers with the mysteries and regrets of a whole life...poignant, droll, and eloquent

Capable of altering the way you see the world

Alive with literary brilliance for all its deathly subject matter

Roth's writing looks uncompromisingly straightforward but is subtle and clever... A human story for our times

The genius of this short, bleak, remarkable novel stems from the way that Roth turns his desolate assessment of death into something bracing: an angry acceptance that mortality is the price we pay for the sheer wonder of this thing called life

Every sentence and every paragraph works with the coiled precision of the watch mechanisms that the narrators father repairs and glitters with the lapidary perfection of the perfection he sells

A simple beautiful ending to a deeply sombre book

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 
 
Everyman is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret and stoicism. 
 
The novel takes its title from a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death. 
 
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 stalked with physical woes. 
 
The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.

Goodbye, Columbus

Philip Roth's first book, which won the National Book Award for Fiction, now reissued in electric new backlist style

Unlike those of us who come howling into the world, blind and bare, Mr Roth appears with nails, hair, teeth, speaking coherently. He is skilled, witty, energetic and performs like a virtuoso

A great novella - amazingly, this was Roth's first book - about love, sex and growing up

Opening the first page of any Philip Roth is like hearing the ignition on a boiler roar into life. Passion is what we're going to get, and plenty of it

Philip Roth’s debut novella and Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction 
 
 Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin, he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills, who meet one summer and fall into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories - sometimes iconoclastic, sometimes elegiac - that crackle with irreverent originality and display Roth's blazing early talent. 
 
Philip Roth's prize-winning first book instantly established its author's reputation as a writer of explosive wit, merciless insight and humane compassion for even the most self-deluding of his characters. 
 
‘Opening the first page of any Philip Roth is like hearing the ignition on a boiler roar into life. Passion is what we're going to get, and plenty of it’ Guardian

Letting Go

Letting Go was Philip Roth's first full-length novel, now reissued in electric new backlist style

A rich book, full of incident, wry and sad and even in its most desolating scenes somehow amusing

Letting Go is further proof of Mr. Roth's astonishing talent...amusing and touching and shocking by turns

One of the country's finest, most forcefully intelligent and serious contemporary writers

[Roth] has the finest eye for the details of American life since Sinclair Lewis

There's no doubting how good a writer Roth is

Gabe Wallach, freshly discharged from the Korean War army, reeling from his mother's recent death, and thus freed from old attachments, is hungrily seeking new ones. He's drawn to Paul Herz, a fellow graduate in literature, and to Libby - Paul's moody, Catholic-turned-Jewish wife. Gabe wonders: how to reconcile the ordered 'world of feeling' found in books with the anarchy of life, responsible adulthood, and his own love affairs? When Gabe meets Martha Reganhart, a spirited, outspoken, divorced mother of two, she poses the greatest challenge that he, and his moral enthusiasm, will face. 
 
Letting Go is Philip Roth's blistering first full-length novel.

Reading Myself And Others

A collection of Philip Roth's essays, journalism and interviews, reissued in electric new backlist style for October 2016

He is utterly and intensely American, a voice, perhaps the voice, of the last decades of what was billed as "the American century"

Excellent...Roth's sensitivity to the balance of situations in his own fiction is Jamesian in its subtlety...consistently thoughtful and thoroughly engaging

An illuminating glimpse of the theory and practice that have made Roth a major figure in American fiction... Reveals a first-rate mind

Philip Roth's writing career spans a remarkable five decades, a period that has seen him rise to become one of the greatest chroniclers of post-war American life. Collected here are some of the finest interviews, essays and articles discussing his own fiction and the range of controversies that it sparked, including his long interview with the Paris Review. Here too are Roth's writings on American fiction, Milan Kundera, baseball, and his deep admiration for Franz Kafka. Coursing through each of these pieces is the Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness that have defined Roth's writing for half a century.

When She Was Good

When She Was Good, both its sustained theme and its detail work, is a step above most recent novels... Roth is a serious writer, willing to turn his face against fashion and the expected, and to take improbable chances'

High, careful tragedy, nasty as life, and Roth emerges...as a Dreiser who can write!

Compassion mingles with horror in a superb portrayal of a young woman's obsession with moral rectitude

When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her irresponsible, alcoholic father thrown in jail. Since then, Lucy has become a furious adolescent - raging against middle-class life and provincial American piety - intent on reforming the men around her: especially her incompetent mama's boy of a husband, Roy. As time rolls on, Lucy struggles to free herself of the terrible disappointment engendered by her father, and is forever yearning for the man he could never be. It is with scalpel-like precision that Roth depicts the rage, the hatred and the ferocity of feeling that soon takes hold of Lucy's life.

The Counterlife

Reissued in electric new backlist style for October 2016, The Counterlife was lauded by the likes of John Updike, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, John Banville and James Wood, as well as winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction

Roth is a comic genius... In this book (wonderfully sharp, worryingly intense) he is an electrifier

Boisterously serious, dense, fizzing and formally audacious... The final thing that needs to be said about The Counterlife...is that it's fucking funny

No other writer combines such a surface of colloquial relaxation with such a dense load of mediating intelligence - Roth has never written more scrupulously or, in spots, more lovingly

Magnificent...splendid... I hope The Counterlife felt, as Mr. Roth wrote it, like a triumph, because that is certainly how it reads to me

The Plot Against America

‘In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, Roth precisely described the sinister and chilling nightmare in which the United States now finds itself' Bernard-Henri Lévy

It’s one of the great political novels for its depiction of how alterations in power affect ordinary men and women, and how obedience brings disaster.

In his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, Roth precisely described the sinister and chilling nightmare in which the United States now finds itself… America has not read enough of Philip Roth

A dark, humane masterpiece, Roth is at the peak of his powers

Another frighteningly intense performance

The word genius doesn't seem excessive... The Plot Against America creates its reality magisterially, in long, fluid sentences that carry you beyond scepticism

Untouchable...he is bequeathing us a body of work that adds up to the most accomplished dissection of American political, social and personal mores

Magnificent. Roth is writing the best books of his life. He captures better than anyone the collision of public and private, the intrusion of history into the skin, the pores of every individual alive

Subtle, persuasive and unsettling. A brilliantly troubling and heartening novel

Many passages in The Plot Against America echo feelings voiced today by vulnerable Americans – immigrants and minorities as alarmed by Trump’s election as the Jews of Newark are frightened by Lindbergh’s

Dazzling. The most exciting novelist writing today

The novel is full of his usual furious cackling; tragedy tipping into comedy and comedy into tragedy within the space of a few sentences. The prose is beautiful

One of the best writers of dialogue in the history of inverted commas

A reverberating celebration of family, community and humanity

'He captures better than anyone the collision of public and private, the intrusion of history into the skin, the pores of every individual alive' Guardian 
 
'Though on the morning after the election disbelief prevailed, especially among the pollsters, by the next everybody seemed to understand everything...' 
 
When celebrity aviator, Charles A. Lindbergh, wins the 1940 presidential election on the slogan of 'America First', fear invades every Jewish household. Not only has Lindbergh blamed the Jews for pushing America towards war with Germany, he has negotiated an 'understanding' with the Nazis promising peace between the two nations. 
 
Growing up in the 'ghetto' of Newark, Philip Roth recounts his childhood caught in the stranglehold of this counterfactual nightmare. As America sinks into its own dark metamorphosis and Jewish families are torn apart, fear and uncertainty spread. 
 
Who really is President Lindbergh? 
 
And to what end has he hijacked America? 
__________________________ 
 
'Many passages in The Plot Against America echo feelings voiced today by vulnerable Americans - immigrants and minorities as alarmed by Trump's election as the Jews of Newark are frightened by Lindbergh's' New Yorker 
 
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**

The Ghost Writer

Reissued in electric new backlist style, The Ghost Writer is the first in Philip Roth's famous series of Zuckerman Books

I had only to read the two opening sentences to realize that I was once again in the hands of a superbly endowed storyteller

Further evidence that Roth can do practically anything with fiction. His narrative power - the ability to delight the reader simultaneously with the telling and the tale - is superb

His prose is immaculate yet curiously plain and unostentatious, as natural as brething

When talented young writer Nathan Zuckerman makes his pilgrimage to sit at the feet of his hero, the reclusive master of American Literature, E. I. Lonoff, he soon finds himself enmeshed in the great Jewish writer's domestic life, with all its complexity, artifice and drive for artistic truth. 
 
As Nathan sits in breathlessly awkward conversation with his idol, a glimpse of a dark-haired beauty through a closing doorway leaves him reeling. He soon learns that the entrancing vision is Amy Bellette, but her position in the Lonoff household - student? mistress? - remains tantalisingly unclear. Over a disturbed and confusing dinner, Nathan gleans snippets of Amy’s haunting Jewish background, and begins to draw his own fantastical conclusions…

Philip Roth

A passionate and coruscating American tragedy

Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity

One of the great political novels of our age; a card-carrying Shakespearean tragedy with New Jersey dirt beneath its fingernails

A magnificent novel of ideas, a disquisition on the fallout of the death of ideology

Roth explores our expedients and tragedies with a masterly, often unnerving, blend of tenderness, harshness, insight and wit...a gripping novel

Roth remains as edgy, as furious, as funny, and as dangerous as he was forty years ago

I Married a Communist proves that, following the success of Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral, he remains on extraordinary form... Wonderful storytelling and characterisation

The McCarthy era has faded, eerily, into nostalgia, just as Capitol Hill produces its own 90s version of witch-hunt and communal obsession with enemies of the state, and perversions of justice perpetrated in democracy's name. Roth avoids nostalgia by making his narrator an active, if unwitting participant in the original drama, caught up in political currents and counter-currents he did not comprehend at the time

Roth’s conflicted, many-layered characters give this work memorable force

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Philip Roth turns his gaze on 30s and 40s America in this magnificent successor to American Pastoral. 
 
Ira Ringold is an American roughneck who transforms himself from a ditch-digger in 1930s New Jersey, to a radio hotshot in the 1940s. In his heyday as a star – and as a bullying supporter of 'progressive' political causes – Ira marries Hollywood's leading lady, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon is short-lived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling exposé that identifies Ira as 'an American taking his orders from Moscow'. In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge friends become deadly enemies, parents and children estranged, lovers blacklisted and the great felled from vertiginous heights. 
 
‘Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity’ Mail on Sunday 
 
‘A passionate and coruscating American tragedy’ Financial Times

Philip Roth

Praise for I Married a Communist

A passionate and coruscating American tragedy

Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity

One of the great political novels of our age; a card-carrying Shakespearean tragedy with New Jersey dirt beneath its fingernails

A passionate and coruscating American tragedy

Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity

One of the great political novels of our age; a card-carrying Shakespearean tragedy with New Jersey dirt beneath its fingernails

A passionate and coruscating American tragedy

Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity

One of the great political novels of our age; a card-carrying Shakespearean tragedy with New Jersey dirt beneath its fingernails

Books by Philip Roth

Articles featuring Philip Roth

Where to start with Philip Roth

The greatest wedding scenes in fiction

What to read after The Handmaid’s Tale

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