Bøker av Philip Roth

“Until the day of Merriwether’s departure from the house—a month after his divorce—the Merriwether family looked like an ideally tranquil one” we read on the first page of Other Men’s Daughters. It is the late 1960s, and the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, are full of long-haired hippies decked out in colorful garb, but Dr. Robert Merriwether, who teaches at Harvard and has been married for a good long time, hardly takes note. Learned, curious, thoughtful, and a creature of habit, Merriwether is anything but an impulsive man, and yet over the summer, while Sarah, his wife, is away on vacation, he meets a summer student, Cynthia Ryder, and before long the two have fallen into bed and in love. Richard Stern’s novel is an elegant and unnerving examination of just how cold and destructive a thing love, “the origin of so much story and disorder,” can be.

America’s most celebrated writer returns with a definitive edition of his essential statements on literature, his controversial novels, and the writing life, including including six pieces published here for the first time and many others newly revised.Throughout a unparalleled literary career that includes two National Book Awards (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959 and Sabbath’s Theater, 1995), the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (American Pastoral, 1997), the National Book Critics Circle Award (The Counterlife, 1986), and the National Humanities Medal (awarded by President Obama in 2011), among many other honors, Philip Roth has produced an extraordinary body of nonfiction writing on a wide range of topics: his own work and that of the writers he admires, the creative process, and the state of American culture. This work is collected for the first time in Why Write?, the tenth and final volume in the Library of America’s definitive Philip Roth edition. Here is Roth’s selection of the indispensable core of Reading Myself and Others, the entirety of the 2001 book Shop Talk, and “Explanations,” a collection of fourteen later pieces brought together here for the first time, six never before published. Among the essays gathered are “My Uchronia,” an account of the genesis of The Plot Against America, a novel grounded in the insight that “all the assurances are provisional, even here in a two-hundred-year-old democracy”; “Errata,” the unabridged version of the “Open Letter to Wikipedia” published on The New Yorker’s website in 2012 to counter the online encyclopedia’s egregious errors about his life and work; and “The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction,” a speech delivered on the occasion of his eightieth birthday that celebrates the “refractory way of living” of Sabbath’s Theater’s Mickey Sabbath. Also included are two lengthy interviews given after Roth’s retirement, which take stock of a lifetime of work.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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.

Simon Axler is one of America's leading classical stage actors, but his talent - his magic - has deserted him. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

'This is a vicious, furious book, unapologetically not of this age - it is also horribly funny and unflinchingly honest' New StatesmanDavid Kepesh, white-haired, and now in his sixties, is an eminent cultural critic on NPR radio and a formidable lecturer at a New York college.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for FictionThe Counterlife is about people living their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter their destinies.

'This swift, elegant, disturbing novel...stands at the extreme of contemporary fiction' New York Times Book ReviewHe is a middle-aged American writer called Philip; In Philip's London studio, this play of voices - sharp, tender and inquiring - reveals both their past lives with startling clarity.

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.

With his fortieth birthday receding into the distance, along with his hairline and his most successful novel, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious affliction - pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. What will it take for the pain to finally leave him alone?

In search of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, American novelist Nathan Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s.

When talented young writer Nathan Zuckerman makes his pilgrimage to sit at the feet of his hero, the reclusive master of American Literature, E.

Following the wild success of his novel, Carnovsky, Nathan Zuckerman has been catapulted into the literary limelight. But beneath the uneasy glamour are the spectres of the recently murdered Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr, and an unsettled Zuckerman feels himself watched...

Like a latter-day Gregor Samsa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed. audacious, heretical - as darkly hilarious as it is existentially unnerving - making new the silliness, triviality and wonderful meaninglessness of lived human experience.

The Ruppert Mundy's, once the great 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. In this novel, the author turns his attention to one of the most beloved of all American rituals: baseball.

What qualities helped Primo Levi survive the demented laboratory of Auschwitz? What does Milan Kundera make of being denounced as a subversive writer in communist Czechoslovakia? What does Edna O'Brien think drove generations of Irish writers into exile? This book explores the importance of region, politics and history in their work.

Presents an acerbic response to the phenomenon of Richard M Nixon. In the character of Trick E Dixon, the author 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.

As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself as 'a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes' - an identity that will cling to him for a lifetime.

Startlingly, Philip Roth meets a man in Jerusalem called Philip Roth who has been touring Israel - riding high on the author's reputation - preaching a bizarre reverse-exodus of the Jews, encouraging them to return to their ancestral homes in Europe.