Philip Roth Boeken

Toen luchtvaartheld Charles A. Lindbergh bij de verkiezingen van 1940 Franklin Roosevelt versloeg, sloeg in elke joodse familie in Amerika de angst toe. Lindbergh verweet de joden al tijdenlang dat ze uit eigenbelang aanstuurden op een zinloze oorlog met nazi-Duitsland. Als drieëndertigste president van de Verenigde Staten kwam hij direct tot een vriendschappelijke verstandhouding met Adolf Hitler, zonder een probleem te maken van diens antisemitische politiek en de Duitse oorlogsmidaden in Europa. Wat er daarna gebeurde in Amerika vormt de historische achtergrond voor 'Het complot tegen Amerika', de confronterende roman waarin Philip Roth vertelt hoe zijn eigen familie overleefde tijdens de periode-Lindbergh, toen joods-Amerikaanse staatsburgers alle reden hadden om het ergste te vrezen. Philip Roth (1933) won in 1997 met 'Amerikaanse pastorale' de Pullitzer Prize. In 1998 nam hij in het Witte Huis de National Medal of Arts in ontvangst en in 2002 werd zijn gehele oeuvre onderscheiden met de gouden medaille van de American Academy of Arts and Letters, die eerder werd toegekend aan schrijvers als John Dos Passos, William Faulkner en Saul Bellow. Hij won twee keer de National Book Award, de PEN/Faulkner Award en de National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005 werd Philip Roth de derde schrijver wiens verzameld werk tijdens zijn leven is opgenomen in de Library of America.

In de vorm van een biecht vertelt de 33-jarige hoofdpersoon over zijn leven waarin hij de seksualiteit en de erotiek tot het uiterste wil beleven, hetgeen volkomen in tegenstelling is tot zijn strenge joodse opvoeding en de dwangbuis van zijn jeugd.

The best-selling author offers his observations of the physical decline and death of his own father, in a memoir of the love between father and son

Patrimony is a true story about the relationship between a father and a son. Philip Roth watches as his eight-six-year-old father, famous for his vigour, his charm and his skill as a raconteur - lovingly called 'the Bard of Newark' - battles with the brain tumour that will kill him. The son, full of love, anxiety and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father's long engagement with life. Written with fierce tenderness, Patrimony is a classic work of memoir by a master storyteller.

Selections from nine novels following Goodbye Columbus, Roth's first book, including Letting Go, Portnoy's Complaint, and The Ghost Writer, chronicle Roth's satiric and sensitive examination of art, life, and personal crisis

Four complete works by Philip Roth in one volume. The complete comic saga of Nathan Zuckerman, his ordeals of conscience, from Manhattan, to Miami Beach, to Czechoslovakia!"Roth has transcended himself . . . . A comic genius . . . Certainly Philip Roth's finest achievement to date, eclipsing even his best single fictions . . . ZUCKERMAN BOUND binds together THE GHOST WRITER, ZUCKERMAN UNBOUND, and THE ANATOMY LESSON, adding to them as epilogue a wild short novel, THE PRAGUE ORGY, which is at once the bleakest and the funniest writing Roth has done."-- The New York Times Book Review"ZUCKERMAN BOUND proves that no one now writing can be funnier and, at the same time, more passionately serious than Philip Roth." -- Time"ZUCKERMAN BOUND shows the author's always ebullient invention and artful prose at their most polished and concentrated." -- The New Yorker

A fictional account of the persecution and suffering of the Jews. It is simple in style and full of dark humour, irony and lyricism. The author served in Moscow as a member of the Czech section of the Comintern but was later expelled from the Communist party. This is his best-known novel.

"The title novella, Goodbye, Columbus, the story of a summer romance between a poor young man from Newark and a rich Radcliffe co-ed, is both a tightly wrought tale of youthful desire and a satiric gem that takes aim at the comfortable affluence of the postwar boom. Here and in the stories that accompany it, including "The Conversion of the Jews" and "Defender of the Faith," Roth depicts Jewish lives in 1950s America with an unflinching sharpness of observation." In Letting Go, a sprawling novel set largely against the backdrop of Chicago in the 1950s, Roth portrays the moral dilemmas of young people cast precipitously into adulthood, and in the process describes a skein of social and family responsibilities as they are brought into focus by issues of marriage, abortion, adoption, friendship, and career. The novel's expansiveness provides a wide scope for Roth's gift for vivid characterization, and in his protagonist Gabe Wallach he creates a nuanced portrait of a responsive young academic whose sense of morality draws him into the ordeals of others with unforeseen consequences.Library of America #157

"Seymour 'Swede' Levov - a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory - comes of age in thriving, triumphant post-war America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall - of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder."--Publisher's website.

Originally published: New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.