Philip Roth
1) Everyman
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Description
The tragically human hero of this book discovers the universal experiences of love, loss, regret, and mortality as a painful surprise. At the pinnacle of his life, he's a swaggering advertising director, a fond but flawed parent, and a faithless husband. Then his life winds down to something far less comfortable. At the end, he has a daughter who adores him, but he's three-times divorced, his sons aren't speaking to him, and he's estranged from his...
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Pub. Date
2004
Appears on list
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When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the thirty-third president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial...
3) Indignation
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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...
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Series
Kepesh novels volume 3
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David Kepesh is white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college, when he meets Consuela Castillo, a decorous, well-mannered student of twenty-four, the daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who promptly puts his life into erotic disorder.
Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, when he left his wife and child, Kepesh has experimented with living what he calls an "emancipated manhood," beyond the...
Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, when he left his wife and child, Kepesh has experimented with living what he calls an "emancipated manhood," beyond the...
6) Exit ghost
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A 71-year-old Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York after more than a decade in rural New England, ostensibly to see a doctor about a prostate condition that has left him incontinent and probably impotent. But Zuckerman being Zuckerman and Roth being Roth, the plot is much more complicated than it at first appears. . .(From Publishers Weekly)
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Pub. Date
2011
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From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral comes a funny, chilling novel set in a small town in the 1940s Midwest, featuring a young woman whose moral goodness may destroy her.
When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With...
When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With...
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Gil Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire. The ex-con first baseman John Baal, "The Babe Ruth of the Big House," who never hit a homerun sober. If you've never heard of them -- or of the Ruppert Mundy's, the only homeless big-league ball team in American history -- it's because of the Communist plot and the capitalist scandal that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory.
10) Philip Roth Reading from Letting Go: From Great American Authors Read from Their Works, Volume 1
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Made early in Roth's career, this is from his first novel, Letting Go. Set in the 1950s, it portrays the social constraints of the period as they affect several graduate students at critical points in their lives. The scene Roth reads shows the rather diffident Paul Herz confronted by two of his ancient rooming-house neighbors who have a favor to ask. As the critic John Ciardi wrote, "Three actors with separately trained voices could not have read...
11) The Human Stain
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Coleman Silk has a secret. A terrible, fifty-year-old secret that the esteemed college professor has kept hidden from everyone - including his wife, his children and his down-and-out young lover – and it's about to ruin his entire life.