Philip Roth
Philip Roth (March 19, 1933 - May 22, 2018), born in and lastingly attached to Newark, New Jersy, was one of America’s premier writers of the 20th and the early 21st Centuries. He wrote some short stories, some autobiographical pieces, some essays, and he was generous with introductions and prefaces of other writers’ works. Roth’s towering legacy, his irrepressible creative fountain, however, was the novel. His works garnered an astonishing number and variety of awards, including National Book Awards, Critic’s Circle Awards, PEN/Faulkner Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize. He had lifetime achievement awards from the US and other countries. Famously or notoriously, he was considered universally the missing man on the list of Nobel Prizes for Literature.
It is important that the reader not read one or two Roth books and draw conclusions about Roth personally or professionally. He himself regretted beginning his career with Portnoy’s Complaint as his first novel. Over his career, his range is astonishing, from wicked humor to perceptive satire to serious analyses of the American heart and soul to Kafkaesque dismantling of reality to heartfelt explorations of love and loss. He could do anything with his talent, and he did.
Novels 1993-1995
Novels 1993-1995
This sixth volume of The Library of America’s definitive edition of Philip Roth’s collected works gathers two novels that marked the beginning of a decade-long creative explosion—one remarkable in an older writer and one heralded by critics as unparalleled in American literary history.
The fourth of the “Roth Books,” Operation Shylock, published in 1993 on Roth’s sixtieth birthday, presents the author in face-to-face confrontation with his double, a look-alike impostor—and perfect stranger—who has usurped his biography and whose self-appointed task is to lead the Jews out of Israel and back to Europe, a Moses in reverse and a monstrous nemesis to the real Philip Roth. Suspenseful, hilarious, impassioned, pulsing with speculative intelligence and narrative energy, Operation Shylock is at once spy story, political thriller, meditation on identity, confession, and unfathomable journey through a volatile, frightening Middle East.
Sabbath’s Theater (1995) is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath, whose savage effrontery and mocking audacity are at the heart of the novel, is a gargantuan hero. Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But ghost-ridden and grief-stricken after the death of his longtime Croatian mistress, the unsurpassable Drenka, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction. Two of the leading literary critics of the English-speaking world, Harold Bloom and Frank Kermode, have proposed Sabbath’s Theater as the finest American novel of the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Ross Miller, editor, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut and has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, and Trinity College. His criticism has appeared in scholarly journals, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times. He is the author of American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago and Here’s the Deal: The Buying and Selling of a Great American City.
This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.