Book description
'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 America's most unflaggingly energetic and morally
serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is
David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture
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,
humblingly beautiful twenty-four-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles.
When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged
helplessly into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In
chronicling the themes of eros and mortality, licence and repression,
freedom and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a
book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.
In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American
Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the
White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to
John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He
has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics
Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005
The Plot Against America received the Society of American
Historians' Prize for "the outstanding historical novel on an
American theme for 2003-2004."
Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006
the PEN/Nabokov Award 'for a body of work...of enduring originality
and consummate craftmanship' and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for
achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose 'scale of
achievement over a sustained career...places him or her in the highest
rank of American literature.'
Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published
in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The
last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.
