Which philip roth to read

The Conversion of the Jews recounts the story of a rabbi, Defender of the Faith takes place in the army, Epstein is about a man who goes through a midlife crisis, You Can't Tell a Man by the Song He Sings is about a troublemaker in high school, and Eli, the Fanatic tells the tale of a small Jewish community clashing with an Orthodox yeshiva.

Nemesis is set in in the Newark Jewish community of Weequahic. Although most men in the country are abroad serving in the war, year-old Bucky Cantor, a weightlifter, stays at home due to poor eyesight. Retrieve credentials. Sign Up. More Perspectives. Featured Interviews. The Magazine: Kirkus Reviews Award-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones reflects on her experiences working on the Project and discusses her plans to adapt the project into an expansive new book. The Kirkus Star One of the most coveted designations in the book industry, the Kirkus Star marks books of exceptional merit.

See the winners. A savage attack on Nixon, the novel centers on Trick E. Dixon, a tap-dancing, tergiversating politician who with smarmy smugness and almost blatant hypocrisy expounds on, e. Private motivations notwithstanding, I Married a Communist is a fantastic evocation of the Red Scare and the American madness that followed.

Eve even winds up a sympathetic character, and Ira equally as indicted in their flagrantly contentious romance. The final Zuckerman novel inverts the first one: instead of, as in The Ghost Writer , a young person from New York City traveling to the country to visit an aging novelist, in Exit Ghost we have an aging novelist coming to the city and interacting with the young.

After it was published, he announced that he was retiring from fiction writing. Aging critic and professor David Kepesh has always had affairs with his students, but his romance with Consuela Castillo plunges him into a state of obsession and jealousy. Consuela, here, is in control of the relationship, and Kepesh winds up a drooling, sycophantic devotee of the year-old, a foolish old man getting what he deserves.

The slim novel The Breast is notable for two reasons. The result is a fun, if slight, Rothian romp on sex, the body, and the delusions we create to face the absurdities of reality. Roth plucks literature professor David Kepesh from the Kafkaesque nightmare of turning into a giant breast and puts him into the Kafkaesque misery of life. What about excitement? What about that woman right there?

Oh, the humanity! With a woman protagonist based on his ex-wife at its center and a cast of Midwesterners orbiting around her forceful ambitions and unwavering rage at the hapless men in her life. Roth published 27 novels during a prolific career that spanned half a century. Here are the novelist's essential books. Buy on Amazon. Roth's first collection of fiction includes the titular novella, plus five short stories all set in the parts of New Jersey to which Roth would so often return.

The debut is classic Roth: irreverent, provocative, sexy, and both a celebration and a slight indictment of middle-class Jewish identity in post-war America. This is the novel that made Roth a literary superstar, and it remains his most controversial. At the center of the novel is Alexander Portnoy, who narrates his story in the form of a monologue with his psychoanalyst as the pair try to get the root of Portnoy's central problem: his oversexed nature and gleeful, overzealous self-abuse.

Roth continued his examination of Jewish-American identity with all of its complexities, wrestling with the aftermath of World War II in an American context. Roth won the National Book Award for this novel about Mickey Sabbath, a washed up puppeteer and self-professed dirty old man who deals with the sudden death of his lover in myriad self-destructive ways.

As Sabbath approaches the likely end of his life, he must take stock in his legacy—or lack thereof. Roth's Pulitzer-winning novel, another in his Zuckerman series, is widely considered to be his masterwork.