Book description
As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself 'a rake among
scholars, a scholar among rakes'. Little does he realise how prophetic
this motto will be - or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh
from the domesticity of his childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic
possibility, from a
ménage à trois
in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a
supremely intelligent, affecting and often hilarious novel about the
dilemma of pleasure: where we seek it; why we flee it; and how we
struggle to make a truce between dignity and desire.
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.
