In Philip Roth’s intimate intellectual encounters with an international and diverse cast of writers, they explore the importance of region, politics and history in their work and trace the imaginative path by which a writer’s highly individualized art is informed by the wider conditions of life.
With Primo Levi, Roth discusses the stubborn core of rationality that helped the Italian chemist-writer survive the demented laboratory of Auschwitz. With Milan Kundera, he analyzes the mix of politics and sexuality that made him the most subversive writer in communist Czechoslovakia. With Edna O’Brien, he explores the circumstances that have forced generations of Irish writers into exile. Elsewhere Roth offers appreciative portraits of two friends—the writer Bernard Malamud and the painter Philip Guston—at the end of their careers, and gives us a masterful assessment of the work of Saul Bellow. Intimate, charming, and crackling with ideas about the interplay between imagination and the writer’s historical situation, Shop Talk is a literary symposium of the highest level, presided over by America’s foremost novelist.

The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff.
At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. If she were, it might change his life.
The first volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound , The Ghost Writer is about the tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency—and about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other.

Roth's award-winning first book instantly established its author's reputation as a writer of explosive wit, merciless insight, and a fierce compassion for even the most self-deluding of his characters. Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin, he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills, who meet one summer break and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender and that illuminate the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora.

As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.
For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longer-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.

“มันเริ่มขึ้นมาอย่างพิลึก” เดวิด เคเพช ตัวเอกของเรื่องนี้บอกกับเราแบบนั้นและถูกต้องที่สุด นี่คือเรื่องราวพิลึกพิลั่นที่สุด เรื่องหนึ่งที่คุณจะได้อ่าน เรื่องของคนกลายร่า งเป็นนมใช่แล้ว...นม คุณอ่านไม่ผิดหรอก “เต้านม” นี่ละ!
เรื่องราวของ เดวิด แอลลัน เคเพช ศาสตราจารย์วิชาวรรณคดีในมหาวิทยาลัย มีชีวิตดีการงานดีชีวิตคู่ดีเป็นคนหนุ่มวัย 38 ปี ที่ร่างกายกํายําแข็งแรง แต่กลับมีสิ่งผิดปกติเกิดขึ้นกับร่างกาย เขารู้สึกซ่าๆ ยิบๆ คล้ายเป็นเหน็บบริเวณขาหนีบ ไม่นานนักผิวใต้ขนตรงของลับก็เป็นสีชมพูเรื่อๆ ก่อนจะกลายเป็นสีแดงและทําให้ผิวบริเวณองคชาตินั้นรับสัมผัสได้อย่างฉับไว ทําให้ความ กระสันทางเพศรุนแรงขึ้น กิจกรรมทางเพศกับภรรยาก็กลับมาเปี่ยมสุขอย่างที่ไม่เคยเป็นมาก่อน
เมื่อลืมตาตื่นมาในเช้าวันหนึ่ง เขาก็ได้กลายร่างเป็นเต้านมผู้หญิงขนาด 6 ฟุต หนัก 155 ปอนด์เป็นเต้านมกลมๆไม่มีแขนขา ไม่มีหัว แต่ยังมีระบบภายใน ของมนุษย์ที่เอื้อให้มีชีวิตอยู่ได้เดวิดต้องอยู่ในห้องพิเศษทางการแพทย์ เพื่อการศึกษาและเฝ้าระวังในโรงพยาบาลภายใต้สายตาของแพทย์และพยาบาลตลอดเวลา เขาอยากจะเป็นบ้าอยากคลุ้มคลั่ง โวยวายอาละวาดเแต่ก็ทําไม่ได้สภาพที่ช่วยตัวเองไม่ได้โดยสิ้นเชิงและมองไม่เห็นสร้างความอึดอัด หมกหมุ่น วิตกจริต และหดหู่ในชะตากรรมของตนเอง ที่ไม่ต่างอะไรกับตัวละครในวิชาวรรณคดีที่เขาสอน อย่างเกรเกอร์ซามซาที่กลายเป็นแมลง หรือ Kovalyov ที่เป็นจมูก
เขาต้องต่อสู้กับลักษณะทางกายภาพ ความปรารถนาทางเพศแสนพิเรนทร์และเผชิญกับพฤติกรรมน่ากระอั่กกระอ่วนจากคนรอบข้าง ทั้งหมอ พ่อ ภรรยา หรือเพื่อนร่วมงานที่ต่างก็พยายามช่วยเหลือเขาซึ่งกลายเป็นการสร้างความโดดเดี่ยว แปลกแยกและน่าเวทนาต่อตัวเอง แต่กระนั้นเดวิดก็ใช้สติและแรงใจในการมองโลก พยายามเยียวยาตนเองจากอาการ “นมๆ” นี้อย่างสุดความสามารถ
นม หรือTHE BREAST ผลงานนวนิยายขนาดสั้นของ ฟิลิป ร็อท (Philip Roth) นักเขียนชาวอเมริกันเชื้อสายยิวร่วมสมัยที่ได้ รับรางวัลและเกียรติยศจากสถาบันด้านวรรณกรรมต่างๆ นับไม่ถ้วน รวมถึงรางวัลพูลิตเซอร์ปี 1998 ซึ่งเพิ่งเสียชีวิตไปเมื่อ เดือนพฤษภาคมที่ผ่านมาด้วยวัย 85 ปีงานเขียนชิ้นนี้ตีพิมพ์ในปี 1972 ผู้เขียนสร้างสรรค์งานอย่างมีชั้นเชิงซ่อนสัญลักษณ์ และนัยยะอย่างแยบยล แฝงปรัชญาไว้อย่างจัดจ้าน ซึ่งจะพาผู้อ่านก้าวข้ามความมีอารยธรรมไปกับวิสัยทัศน์ทางกายภาพ และความปรารถนาทางเพศที่เกินขอบเขตจินตนาการ ย้อนมองเนื้อแท้ในจิตสํานึกของมนุษย์ซึ่งสร้างความสนุก ขบขัน เย้ย หยันและพิลึกเหลือที่จะกล่าว

"I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion, he told himself, when you're seventy-five." Philip Roth's new novel is a fiercely intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The best-selling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong confrontation with mortality. Roth's everyman is a hero whose youthful sense of independence and confidence begins to be challenged when illness commences its attack in middle age. A successful commercial advertising artist, he is the father of two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him. He is the brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy. He is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he has made a mess of marriage. Inevitably, he discovers that he has become what he does not want to be. Roth has been hailed as "the most compelling of living writers . . . [His] every book is like a dispatch from the deepest recesses of the national mind."* In Everyman, Roth once again displays his hallmark incisiveness. From his first glimpse of death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through his vigorous, seemingly invincible prime, Roth's hero is a man bewildered not only by his own decline but by the unimaginable deaths of his contemporaries and those he has loved. The terrain of this haunting novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.

Coleman Silk has a secret. But it's not the secret of his affair, at seventy-one, with a woman half his age. And it's not the secret of his alleged racism, which provoked the college witchhunt that cost him his job. Coleman's secret is deeper, and lies at the very core of who he is, and he has kept it hidden from everyone for fifty years. Set in 1998, with the backdrop of the impeachment of a president, "The Human Stain" shows us an America where conflicting moralities and ideological divisions result in public denunciations and houndings, and where innocence is not always a good enough excuse.

The Facts is the unconventional autobiography of a writer who has reshaped our idea of fiction—a work of compelling candor and inventiveness, instructive particularly in its revelation of the interplay between life and art.
Philip Roth concentrates on five episodes from his life: his secure city childhood in the thirties and forties; his education in American life at a conventional college; his passionate entanglement, as an ambitious young man, with the angriest person he ever met (the "girl of my dreams" Roth calls her); his clash, as a fledgling writer, with a Jewish establishment outraged by Goodbye, Columbus ; and his discovery, in the excesses of the sixties, of an unmined side to his talent that led him to write Portnoy's Complaint .
The book concludes surprisingly—in true Rothian fashion—with a sustained assault by the novelist against his proficiencies as an autobiographer.

Like a latter-day Gregor Samsa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed. But where Kafka's protagonist turned into a giant beetle, the narrator of Philip Roth's richly conceived fantasy has become a 155-pound female breast. What follows is a deliriously funny yet touching exploration of the full implications of Kepesh's metamorphosis--a daring, heretical book that brings us face to face with the intrinsic strangeness of sex and subjectivity.

年轻时的凯普什曾追求绝对的个人自由，遵从欲望的召唤，放纵自我，但这样的生活让他心力交瘁；最终他获得回归生活正途的机会时，却犹豫不定，生怕自由被婚姻囚禁。他成了比较文学教授，一面准备开设课程，讲授欧洲小说中的情欲，一面思索人生：自己无异于一个“欲望教授”，跌跌撞撞地奔波在追求学术理性和追逐肉欲满足两条道路之间……
《欲望教授》出版于《乳房》之后，却是《乳房》的前篇，追溯了大卫•凯普什教授的半生经历，反映了他在“变形”之前的经历和内心斗争、作为情欲的牺牲品在欲海中沉浮的情形。
小说《欲望教授》深刻且优雅……实乃大家手笔。
——《纽约时报书评》
菲利普•罗斯是一位伟大的美国情色史学家。他也是书写这种奇异的孤独——人被抛弃、面对自己身体而生的孤独的诗人。
——米兰•昆德拉
菲利普•罗斯应该位于索尔•贝娄和约翰•厄普代克之间。这样说不是基于某种商业的或者学院批评的顺序，而是说他们比肩而立。
——孙甘露

No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you’re not superior to sex. With these words our most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college–as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete’s critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.
The agency of Kepesh’s undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous and humblingly beautiful 24-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged–helplessly, bitterly, furiously–into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling this descent, Philip Roth performs a breathtaking set of variations on the themes of eros and mortality, license and repression, selfishness and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.

The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s; a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his literary idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. If she were, it might change his life...The first volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The Ghost Writer is about the tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency - and about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other.

The last ordeal of Nathan Zuckerman, the indomitable literary adventurer of Roth's nine Zuckerman books, 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 protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body.
The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman's youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman's first literary hero, E. I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation.
The third connection is with Lonoff's would-be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff's "great secret." Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.
Haunted by Roth's earlier work The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer's insatiable commitment to fiction.
<span class="h1"><strong>Exit Zuckerman: Talking with Philip Roth</strong></span>
<img src="http://g-ec2.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/books/a-plus/Roth_Philip2_140h.jpg" border="0" align="right"> When we talked with Philip Roth for the Amazon Wire podcast, we asked him about his long relationship with his fictional surrogate, Nathan Zuckerman, his decision to bring Zuckerman back (and say goodbye to him) in Exit Ghost, and the difficulties of aging for novelists, and we managed to touch on George Plimpton, Annie Dillard, Grace Paley, and The Tempest, along with nearly all of the nine Zuckerman books. You can listen to interview in the podcast above, or read the full transcript.
<span class="h1"><strong>Zuckerman Returns to Manhattan: Philip Roth Reads from Exit Ghost</strong></span>
When Nathan Zuckerman returns to Manhattan from his self-imposed rural retreat for the first time in 11 years in Exit Ghost, what does he find? Along with his surprising and unsettling encounters with an aged and ill woman who had once been a young mystery to him, an aggressive biographer who won't take no for an answer, and an alluring young writer who tempts him back into the adventure of seduction, he is confronted with a city whose streets are filled with people behaving quite differently than a decade before. "For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time," he thinks. "I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking about under no one's surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the street through one's animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire." Listen to Philip Roth read an excerpt from Exit Ghost.
<span class="h1"><strong>Looking Back on Zuckerman</strong></span> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="33%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0679748989.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left">The Ghost Writer: Introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer who spends a night in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff, and meets a haunting young woman whom he imagines could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution.</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> <td width="34%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0679748997.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left">Zuckerman Unbound: Zuckerman, with newfound fame as a bestselling author, ventures onto the streets of Manhattan in the final year of the turbulent '60s, where he is assumed by fans and enemies to be his own fictional satyr, Gilbert Carnovsky ("Hey, you do all that stuff in that book?").</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> <td width="33%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0679749020.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left">The Anatomy Lesson: At 40, Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious affliction--pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman is unable to write a line, but the novel provides some of the funniest and fiercest scenes in all of Roth's fiction.</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> </tr> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="33%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0679749039.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left">The Prague Orgy: In quest of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s, where he discovers, among the oppressed writers with whom he quickly becomes embroiled, an appealingly perverse kind of heroism.</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> <td width="34%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1598530119.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left">Zuckerman Bound: The latest in the Library of America's collected Roth works brings together his first Zuckerman trilogy, The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Anatomy Lesson, along with the epilogue, The Prague Orgy.</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> <td width="33%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0679749047.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left">The Counterlife: From New Jersey to England to the West Bank, the characters in The Counterlife, illuminated by the skeptical, enveloping intelligence of Nathan Zuckerman, are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate.</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> </tr> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="33%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0375701427.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left">American Pastoral: Swede Levov, legendary high-school athlete and boyhood idol of Nathan Zuckerman, is wrenched overnight out of the American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk when his teenage daughter proves capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism.</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> <td width="34%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0375707212.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left">I Married a Communist: The rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, takes the young Zuckerman under his wing, and is destroyed, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s.</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> <td width="33%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0375726349.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left">The Human Stain: Coleman Silk, an aging classics professor forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist, has a secret, kept for 50 years from all around him, including his friend Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled.</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> </tr> </table>
<p align="left">

The famous confession of Alexander Portnoy who is thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality, yet held back at the same time by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood.

A fiction-within-a-fiction, a labyrinthine edifice of funny, mournful, and harrowing meditations on the fatal impasse between a man and a woman, My Life as a Man is Roth's most blistering novel.
At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol, a gifted young writer and the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen's death, Peter is still trying—and failing—to write his way free of it. Out of desperate inventions and cauterizing truths, acts of weakness, tenderheartedness, and shocking cruelty, Philip Roth creates a work worthy of Strindberg—a fierce tragedy of sexual need and blindness.

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 protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jaime, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body.The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman's youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman's first literary hero, E.I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation. The third connection is with Lonoff's would-be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff's "great secret".Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities. Haunted by Roth's earlier works - the melancholy comedy of "The Ghost Writer", the counterpoint of the imaginary and the real in "The Counterlife", the distinctive dialogues of "Deception" - "Exit Ghost" is a reminder of Roth's incomparable style and themes and an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer's insatiable commitment to fiction.

Philip Roth's twenty-seventh book takes its title from an anonymous fifteenth-century English allegorical play whose drama centres on the summoning of the living to death and whose hero, "Everyman", is intended to be the personification of mankind. The fate of Roth's "Everyman" is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers and during his hospitalisation as a nine-year-old surgical patient through the crises of health that come close to killing him as a vigorous adult, and into his old age, when he is undone by the death and deterioration of his contemporaries and relentlessly stalked by his own menacing physical woes. A successful commercial advertising artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons who despise him and a daughter who adores him, the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. "Everyman" is a painful human story of the regret and loss and stoicism of a man who becomes what he does not want to be. The terrain of this savagely sad short novel is the human body, and its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.

Along with Saul Bellow's Herzog, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint defined Jewish American literature in the 1960s. Roth's masterpiece takes place on the couch of a psychoanalyst, an appropriate jumping-off place for an insanely comical novel about the Jewish American experience. Roth has written several great books--Goodbye, Columbus and When She Was Good among them, but it is perhaps Portnoy's Complaint for which he is best known.