Roth, Philip

Portnoy's complaint by Philip Roth ( Book )
222 editions published between 1960 and 2011 in 9 languages and held by 5,181 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
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

The plot against America by Philip Roth ( Book )
89 editions published between 1942 and 2012 in 11 languages and held by 5,159 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
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 "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and whose virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without difficulty. What followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new book by Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth, who recounts what it was like for his Newark family-and for a million such families all over the country-during the menacing years of the Lindbergh presidency, when American citizens who happened to be Jews had every reason to expect the worst

American pastoral by Philip Roth ( Book )
92 editions published between 1997 and 2013 in 12 languages and held by 4,306 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
The tragic impact of the Vietnam War on a relationship between father and daughter. The father is an upstanding individual who believes in the American Dream, but his daughter has a different dream, to get America out of Vietnam and she kills innocent people to achieve it. For the father it is the end of the world, he has lost his daughter. By the author of Sabbath's Theater

The human stain by Philip Roth ( Book )
84 editions published between 2000 and 2012 in 6 languages and held by 4,264 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
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 controversy, Silk must struggle to keep his greatest secret, a secret he's held for the majority of his life, from becoming made public

Goodbye, Columbus and five short stories by Philip Roth ( Book )
136 editions published between 1957 and 2006 in English and Undetermined and held by 3,937 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
A Radcliffe girl and a Rutgers boy learn about love in Goodbye, Columbus

Everyman by Philip Roth ( Book )
49 editions published between 2006 and 2008 in 3 languages and held by 3,743 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
"A successful commercial artist with a New York ad agency, he is the father of two sons from a first marriage who despise him and a daughter from a second marriage who adores him, He is the beloved brother of a good man whose physical well-being comes to arouse his bitter envy, and he is the lonely ex-husband of three very different women with whom he's made a mess of marriage. In the end he is a man who has become what he does not want to be." From the bookjacket

Nemesis by Philip Roth ( Book )
67 editions published between 2010 and 2013 in 10 languages and held by 3,722 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
Roth's "Nemesis" is the story of a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children

Exit ghost by Philip Roth ( Book )
68 editions published between 2006 and 2011 in 7 languages and held by 3,589 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
After eleven years of solitude working on his New England mountain as a writer, Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York to confront a turbulent city in the wake of September 11, as well as the aging Amy Bellette, one-time muse to his first literary hero, E.I. Lonoff

Indignation by Philip Roth ( )
57 editions published between 2008 and 2012 in 4 languages and held by 3,527 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
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 neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad--mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy. As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father's fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.--From publisher's description

The ghost writer by Philip Roth ( Book )
83 editions published between 1979 and 2013 in 10 languages and held by 3,387 WorldCat member libraries worldwide
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. --From publisher description