`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...

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...

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...

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.

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.

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...

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...

A Radcliffe girl and a Rutgers boy learn about love in the story Goodbye, Columbus.

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

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.