Book description
Everything is over for Simon Axler. One of the leading American stage
actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his
talent and his assurance. When he goes on stage he feels like a lunatic
and looks like an idiot. His wife has gone, his audience has left him,
his agent can't persuade him to make a comeback. In this long day's
journey into night, told with Roth's inimitable urgency, bravura and
gravity, all our life's performances - talent, love, sex, hope, energy,
reputation - are stripped bare.
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.
