Everyman
By Philip Roth
(Vintage, Paperback, 9780307277718, 192pp.)
Publication Date: April 10, 2007
Other Editions of This Title: Hardcover (May 2006), Compact Disc (May 2006)
Categories: Literary
 |     |
Philip Roth's new novel is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret, and stoicism. The bestselling author of The Plot Against America now turns his attention from "one family's harrowing encounter with history" (New York Times) to one man's lifelong skirmish with mortality.
The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age, when he is rended by observing the deterioration of his contemporaries and stalked by his own physical woes.
The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.
In the 1990s Philip Roth won America’s four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer
Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain’s W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six years “for the entire work of the recipient.” In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians Award for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003—2004.” In 2007 Roth received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman.
"Our most accomplished novelist. . . . [With Everyman] personal tenderness has reached a new intensity."
—The New Yorker
“If descriptive amplitude went out with the nineteenth century, Philip Roth, who strides the whole time and territory of the word, has resuscitated it – in description revved with the power of narrative itself.”
—The New York Times Book Review
"Let's use a noun I've never used before: masterpiece."
—Atlantic Monthly
“[Roth is] as essential to the experience of modern America–its literature, history, and moral reckoning–as any writer on the planet.”
—The Boston Globe
 |
The Tyranny of E-mail John Freeman Scribner |
 |
Ordinary Thunderstorms William Boyd HarperCollins |
 |
The Girl with Glass Feet Ali Shaw Henry Holt and Co. |
 |
The Book of Fires Jane Borodale Viking |
