Philip Roth

What impact can American history have on the life of the vulnerable individual? It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working...

Coleman Silk is a respected professor at a New England college who suddenly finds his life unraveling after a comment he makes about some African-American students is misinterpreted as a racial slur. As the scandal heats up, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer researching a biography of Silk, begins to dig deeply into Silk's life. Eventually, matters are made worse when Coleman's affair with a young married janitor named Faunia Farley is exposed. But amid...

The life of an old man who lives for sex. He is Morris Sabbath, 64, a New York puppeteer who made his name with lewd performances. Feeling death approaching, he relives his many amorous adventures in graphic detail.

"[A] disturbing masterpiece." —New York Review of Books

"Powerful...Roth's narrator newly illuminates the American body, the American soul, the life of loving and the love of life that has always been so all-consuming in his fiction." — Chicago Tribune

The final, incendiary Kepesh novel and the unforgettable story of an affair between a star lecturer at a New York college and the beautiful

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Everything is over for Simon Axler. A leading American actor of his generation, now in his sixties, Simon has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance. When he goes on stage he feels like a lunatic. His confidence has drained away; he imagines people laughing at him. His wife is gone, his audience has left him, and his agent can't persuade him to make a comeback. Into this terrifying self-evacuation bursts a counterplot of unusual erotic desire,...

Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age.
Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully...

After he is transformed into a 155-pound female breast, college professor David Kepesh struggles to rationalize his condition by proving he is insane.

A novel narrated by octogenarian ex-sportswriter Word Smith, who plans to write the "Great American Novel" and also to tell the tragic and hilarious story of the Ruppert Mundys - the only homeless baseball team ever to play in the big league, who have disappeared from all official histories.