Philip Roth
Author
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 8.2 - AR Pts: 24
Formats
Description
`When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the thirty-third president of the United states, he negotiated a cordial...
2) Nemesis
Author
Formats
Description
In 1944 Newark, devoted playground director Bucky Cantor, sidelined from the war due to his poor eyesight, watches in horror as the city's polio epidemic begins to ravage the children on his playground.
3) The humbling
Author
Pub. Date
2009.
Formats
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. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, "are melted into air, into thin air." When he goes onstage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His confidence in his powers has drained away; he imagines people laughing at him; he can no longer pretend to be...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2013
Formats
Description
American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall—of a strong, confident master of social equilibrium overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. Seymour "Swede" Levov—a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, the prosperous inheritor of his father's Newark glove factory—comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins...
Author
Pub. Date
2001
Description
In Philip Roth's intimate intellectual encounters with an international & diverse cast of writers, they explore the importance of region, politics, & history in their work & trace the imaginative path by which a writer's highly individualized art is informed by the wider conditions of life. Milan Kundera & Czechoslovakia, Primo Levi & Auschwitz, Edna O'Brien & Ireland, Aharon Appelfeld & Bukovina, Ivan Klima & Prague, Isaac Singer & Warsaw, Bruno...
Author
Series
Appears on these lists
Description
The tragic impact of the Vietnam War on a relationship between father and daughter. The father is an upstanding individual who believes in the American Dream, but his daughter has a different dream, to get America out of Vietnam and she kills innocent people to achieve it. For the father it is the end of the world, he has lost his daughter. By the author of Sabbath's Theater.
9) Exit ghost
Author
Series
Pub. Date
[2007]
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 6.7 - AR Pts: 11
Description
Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. ALone on his NEw England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age. Walking the streets of his hometown again, Zuckerman makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude: with a young couple he entices with a home swap, with...
10) The human stain
Author
Series
Accelerated Reader
IL: UG - BL: 7.4 - AR Pts: 24
Description
Coleman Silk, a distinguished professor at a small New England college where he has managed over the course of fifty years to make a lot of enemies, experiences a sort of personal liberation when he is forced from his job on false claims of racism -- a charge made all the more ironic due to a secret Silk has been keeping nearly his entire life.
11) Everyman
Author
Formats
Description
A successful commercial artist with three very different ex-wives, a daughter who adores him, and two sons who despise him, the protagonist finds his confidence, sense of independence, and well-being undermined by an attack of illness in middle age.
12) Indignation
Author
Description
What impact can American history have on the life of the vulnerable individual? It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working...
13) Dying animal
Author
Pub. Date
c2001
Description
David Kepesh is white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college, when he meets Consuela Castillo, a decorous, well-mannered student of twenty-four, the daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who promptly puts his life into erotic disorder.
Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, when he left his wife and child, Kepesh has experimented with living what he calls an "emancipated manhood," beyond the reach...
Author
Pub. Date
[1995]
Appears on list
Description
The life of an old man who lives for sex. He is Morris Sabbath, 64, a New York puppeteer who made his name with lewd performances. Feeling death approaching, he relives his many amorous adventures in graphic detail. By the author of Portnoy's Complaint.
15) The ghost writer
Author
Series
Zuckerman novels volume 1
Pub. Date
1995.
Description
At 23, ambitious Nathan Zukerman has had four stories published, received a complimentary profile in Saturday Review, and has alienated his family with his unflattering biographical bent. When well-known author E.I. Lonoff invites Nathan to his secluded New England home, the budding young writer hopes to learn from a master. Instead of inspiration, however, Nathan encounters a man whose self-absorption borders on egomania and a hauntingly mysterious...
Author
Pub. Date
[1991]
Description
This deeply affecting memoir focuses on the time in the author's life when he learned of his father's terminal brain cancer. A remarkable portrait of a father and son, this work confronts death and fear, and, ultimately, extracts the truth of what it means to love and be loved
18) The humbling
Author
Pub. Date
[2014]
Description
When a successsful actor decides to retire from the stage, the daughter of one of his acting friends moves into his house and the two develop a dysfunctional relationship.
19) Elegy
Pub. Date
[2009]
Description
Cultural critic David Kepesh finds his state of 'emancipated manhood' thrown into tragic disarray. David is a renowned college professor whose life is turned inside out when he becomes involved in a passionate relationship with Consuela. Consuela is a well-mannered student who awakens a sense of sexual possessiveness in her teacher. As their sexual relationship evolves, an incredible love story is born.
20) The Human Stain
Pub. Date
2003.
Description
Coleman Silk is a respected professor at a New England college who suddenly finds his life unraveling after a comment he makes about some African-American students is misinterpreted as a racial slur. As the scandal heats up, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer researching a biography of Silk, begins to dig deeply into Silk's life. Eventually, matters are made worse when Coleman's affair with a young married janitor named Faunia Farley is exposed. But amid...