Philip Roth

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

Philip Roth's bestselling alternate history—the chilling story of what happens to one family when America elects a charismatic, isolationist president.

In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election

...

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...

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.

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...

After 11 years of isolation in his New England mountain refuge, Zuckerman returns to New York City and makes three important connections that threaten his carefully protected sense of isolation.

Passion ignites culture clash in this provocative coming-of-age story, based on the best-selling novel by Philip Roth. Marcus, a student from New Jersey arrives at a small conservative college in Ohio. He becomes infatuated with his class mate Olivia. The mutual attraction sparks a torried encounter with consequences no one ever could have imagined. He puts his family's best-laid plans and his own beliefs to the ultimate test.

"For years, Alexander Portnoy has been led about by his libido...and has been unable to satisfy it. Now he can. He's met the Monkey, an uninhibited, air-headed model who -- heart, soul and everything else -- is devotedly Portnoy's. So why isn't he happy? This outlandish spoof of sexuality and ingrained guilt is based on Philip Roth's landmark best-seller." -- Back cover.