Nemeses: Everyman / Indignation / The Humbling / Nemesis

Resumen del libro

What kind of choices fatally shape a life? How does the individual withstand the onslaught of circumstance? These are the dark questions that animate "Nemeses," the quartet of thematically related short novels that are published here together for the first time in this final volume of The Library of America's definitive edition of Philip Roth's collected works. "Everyman "(2006) is the sparse and affecting story of one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality. Set against the backdrop of the Korean War, "Indignation "(2008) is the extraordinary narrative of a young man struggling against the conformity of McCarthy-era America and his father's overwhelming fear. In "The Humbling "(2009), aging actor Simon Axler embarks on a risky and aberrant affair in a desperate attempt to recoup his lost artistic gifts. And in "Nemesis "(2010), Roth offers an exacting portrait of the emotions--fear and anger, bewilderment and grief--bred by a polio epidemic in Newark in the summer of 1944. Philip Roth is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by The Library of America. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the National Medal of Arts, and the Gold Medal in Fiction, the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Biografía del autor

Philip Milton Roth (born March 19, 1933) 1 is an American novelist.<br><br>He first gained attention with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of American-Jewish life for which he received the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction, 2 3 Roth's fiction, regularly set in Newark, New Jersey, is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "supple, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity. 4 His profile rose significantly in 1969 after the publication of the controversial Portnoy's Complaint, the humorous and sexually explicit psychoanalytical monologue of "a lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor," filled with "intimate, shameful detail, and coarse, abusive language." 3 5 <br><br>Roth is one of the most awarded U.S. writers of his generation: his books have twice received the National Book Award, twice the National Book Critics Circle award, and three times the PEN/Faulkner Award. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral, which featured one of his best-known characters, Nathan Zuckerman, the subject of many other of Roth's novels. The Human Stain (2000), another Zuckerman novel, was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize and, in 2012.<br><br>