Philip Roth

American novelist and short story writer. Philip Roth first achieved fame with GOODBYE, COLUMBUS (1959). It consisted of a novella and five short stories and described the life of a of Jewish middle-class family. Ten years later appeared PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT. In this "masturbation story" the narrator searches for freedom by using sex as his way of escape. The book gained a great international success. [Read more]

Goodbye, Columbus
Bantam Books, 1959 (PhP 60.00)
"A masterpiece." Thus "Newsweek" hailed the appearance of "Goodbye, Columbus." Soon afterward, the National Book Award for fiction seconded this judgment. On the surface, the novella and five stories that comprise this extraordinary work deal with the intermingled comedy and tragedy, hilarity and heartbreak of modern Jewish-American life; on a more profound level, their wit, insight and truth strike a universal nerve of recognition. Whether dissecting a passionate, youthful love affair or the divided loyalties of a Jewish top sergeant; whether portraying the desperate alienation of a middle aged man or the wild flights of a weirdly imaginative young boy, Philip Roth demonstrates the amazing talents that have made him one of the foremost writers of his generation--and this, his first great success, a classic of our time.

The Ghost Writer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979, hardcover (PhP 120.00)
Exactly twenty years ago, Philip Roth made his debut with "Goodbye, Columbus," a book that immediately announced the presence of a major new talent. "The Ghost Writer," his eleventh book, begins with a young writer's search, twenty years ago, for the spiritual father who will comprehend and validate his art, and whose support will justify his inevitable flight from a loving but conventionally constricting Jewish middle-class home. Nathan Zuckerman's quest brings him to E. I. Lonoff, whose work--exquisite parables of desire restrained--Nathan much admires. Recently discovered by the literary world after decades of obscurity, Lonoff continues to live as a semi-recluse in rural Massachusetts with his wife, Hope, scion of an old New England family, whom the young immigrant married thirty-five years before. Nathan, although in a state of youthful exultation over his early successes, is still troubled by the conflict between two kinds of conscience: tribal and family loyalties, on the one hand, and the demands of fiction, as he sees them, on the other. A startling imaginative leap and then a final confrontation lead to the beginnings of a kind of wisdom about the unreckoned consequences of art. Shocking, comic, and sad by turns, "The Ghost Writer" is the work of a major novelist in full maturity.