Search - List of Books by Philip Roth

I was being optimistic about 25 years really. I think it's going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range... To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by ... it's hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities[.]

The book can't compete with the screen. It couldn't compete [in the] beginning with the movie screen. It couldn't compete with the television screen, and it can't compete with the computer screen... Now we have all those screens, so against all those screens a book couldn't measure up.

The cry "Watch out for the goyim!" at times seems more the expression of an unconscious wish than of a warning: Oh that they were out there, so that we could be together here! A rumor of persecution, a taste of exile, might even bring with it the old world of feelings and habits — something to replace the new world of social accessibility and moral indifference, the world which tempts all our promiscuous instincts, and where one cannot always figure out what a Jew is that a Christian is not.

Philip Roth's fiction strains to shed the burden of Jewish traditions and proscriptions. The liberated Jewish consciousness, let loose into the disintegration of the American Dream, finds itself deracinated and homeless. American society and politics, by the late sixties, are a grotesque travesty of what Jewish immigrants had traveled towards: liberty, peace, security, a decent liberal democracy.

Films

Zuckerman novels

• The Ghost Writer (1979)
• Zuckerman Unbound (1981)
• The Anatomy Lesson (1983)
• The Prague Orgy (1985)

• The Counterlife (1986)
• American Pastoral (1997)
• I Married a Communist (1998)
• The Human Stain (2000)
• Exit Ghost (2007)

Roth novels

• A Novel (1990)
• A Confession (1993)
• The Plot Against America (2004)

Kepesh novels

• The Breast (1972)
• The Professor of Desire (1977)
• The Dying Animal (2001)

Other novels

• Goodbye, Columbus (1959)
• Letting Go (1962)
• When She Was Good (1967)
• Portnoy's Complaint (1969)
• Our Gang (1971)
• The Great American Novel (1973)
• My Life As a Man (1974)
• Sabbath's Theater (1995)

Nemeses: Short Novels

• Everyman (2006)
• Indignation (2008)
• The Humbling (2009)
• Nemesis (2010)

Nonfiction

• A Novelist's Autobiography (1988)
• A True Story (1991)

Collections

• Reading Myself and Others (1976)
• A Philip Roth Reader (1980, revised edition 1993)
• Shop Talk (2001)

Library of America Editions

• Novels and Stories 1959-1962 (2005) ISBN 978-1-93108279-2
• Novels 1967-1972 (2005) ISBN 978-1-93108280-8
• Novels 1973-1977 (2006) ISBN 978-1-93108296-9
• Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue 1979-1985 (2007) ISBN 978-1-59853-011-7
• Novels and Other Narratives 1986-1991 (2008) ISBN 978-1-59853-030-8
• Novels 1993—1995 (2010) ISBN 978-1-59853-078-0

• 1960 National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus
• 1986 National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife
• 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony
• 1994 PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock
• 1995 National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater
• 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for American Pastoral
• 1998 Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist
• 1998 National Medal of Arts
• 2000 Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (France) for American Pastoral
• 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for The Human Stain
• 2001 Gold Medal In Fiction from The American Academy of Arts and Letters
• 2001 WH Smith Literary Award for The Human Stain
• 2002 National Book Foundation's Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters
• 2002 Prix Médicis Étranger (France) for The Human Stain
• 2003 Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Harvard University
• 2005 Sidewise Award for Alternate History for The Plot Against America
• 2005 James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction for The Plot Against America
• 2006 PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement
• 2007 PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman
• 2007 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction
• 2010 Paris Review's Hadada Prize

• Bloom, Harold and Welsch, Gabe, eds., Modern Critical Interpretations of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint, Chelsea House, 2003.
• Bloom, Harold, ed., Modern Critical Views of Philip Roth, Chelsea House, New York, 2003.
• Cooper, Alan, Philip Roth and the Jews (SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture), SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 1996.
• Kinzel, Till, Die Tragödie und Komödie des amerikanischen Lebens. Eine Studie zu Zuckermans Amerika in Philip Roths Amerika-Trilogie (American Studies Monograph Series), Heidelberg: Winter, 2006.
• Milowitz, Steven, Philip Roth Considered: The Concentrationary Universe of the American Writer, Routledge, New York, 2000.
• Morley, Catherine, The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Literature, Routledge, New York, 2008.
• Parrish, Timothy, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007.
• Podhoretz, Norman, "The Adventures of Philip Roth," Commentary (October 1998), reprinted as "Philip Roth, Then and Now" in The Norman Podhoretz Reader, 2004.
• Posnock, Ross, Philip Roth's Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2006.
• Royal, Derek Parker, Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author, Praeger Publishers, Santa Barbara, CA, 2005.
• Safer, Elaine B., Mocking the Age: The Later Novels of Philip Roth (SUNY Series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture), SUNY Press, Albany, NY, 2006.
• Searles, George J., ed., Conversations With Philip Roth, University of Mississippi Press, Jackson, Mississippi, 1992.
• Searles, George J., The Fiction of Philip Roth and John Updike, Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale, Illinois, 1984.
• Shostak, Debra B., Philip Roth: Countertexts, Counterlives, University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, SC, 2004.
• Simic, Charles, " The Nicest Boy in the World," The New York Review of Books, Vol. LV, No. 15, 9 October 2008.
• Wöltje, Wiebke-Maria, My finger on the pulse of the nation. Intellektuelle Protagonisten im Romanwerk Philip Roths (Mosaic, 26), Trier: WVT, 2006.

Informational

• Literary Encyclopedia biography
• The Philip Roth Society
• Philip Roth looks back on a legendary career, and forward to his final act

Interviews

• Roth interview - from NPR's "Fresh Air", September 2005
• Roth interview - from The Guardian, December 2005
• Roth interview - from Open Source
• Roth interview - from Der Spiegel, February 2008
• Roth interview - from the London Times, October 17, 2009
• Roth interview - from CBC's Writers and Company. Aired 2009-11-01