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. -- Publisher Marketing
No comments:
Post a Comment