Book description
Summer, 1944. In the 'stifling heat of equatorial Newark', a
terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New
Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, even death.
Vigorous, decent, twenty-three year old playground director Bucky
Cantor is devoted to his charges and disappointed with himself because
his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war. As polio
begins to ravage Bucky's playground, Roth leads us through every inch
of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the
anger, the bewilderment, the suffering and the pain.
Through this story runs the dark question that haunts all four of
Roth's late short novels, Everyman, Indignation, The
Humbling, and now, Nemesis: what choices fatally shape a
life? How powerless is each of us up against the force of circumstances?
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.
