Counterlife

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A stunning novel about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate. Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book's evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the miind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the skeptical, enveloping intelligence that calculates the price that's paid in the struggle to change personal fortune and reshape history, whether in a dentist's office in suburban New Jersey, or in a tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire, or in a church in London's West End, or in a tiny desert settlement in Israel's occupied West Bank.

This new biography of the controversial, influential, and prize-winning American novelist Philip Roth, a writer with an international reputation for inventive, original novels from Portnoy's Complaint to American Pastoral and The Plot Against America, is based on new access to archival documents and new interviews with Roth's friends and associates.

This book tells the story of a Jewish Studies that hasn’t fully happened—at least not yet. Newton asks what we mean when we say “Jewish Studies”—and when we imagine it not as mere amalgam but as a project. Jewish Studies offers a unique perspective from which to view the horizon of the academic humanities because, although it arrived belatedly, it has spanned a range of disciplinary locations and configurations, from an “origin story” in nineteenth-century historicism and philology, to the emancipatory politics of the Enlightenment, to the ethnicity-driven pluralism of the postwar decades, to more recent configurations within an interdisciplinary cultural studies. The conflicted allegiances with respect to traditions, disciplines, divisions, stakes, and stakeholders represent the structural and historical situation of the field, as it comes into contact with the humanities more broadly. At once a literary and philosophical thinker, Newton deploys a tableau of texts in concert with an ensemble of vivid, elastic tropes not only to theorize Jewish Studies but also to reimagine it as an agent of that potency Jacques Derrida calls “leverage”—a force multiplier for the field’s multiple possibilities. In refiguring a Jewish Studies to come, the book intervenes in a broader discourse about the challenge of professing disciplinary knowledges while promoting transit across their boundaries. Jewish Studies as Counterlife further amplifies Newton’s career-long articulation of the dialogic as the staging ground of ethical encounter.

"The time would appear ripe then to take a closer look at Roth's more recent or "later" fiction. That is the intent of this gathering of critical essays. This is the only essay collection devoted primarily to Roth's fiction of the last two decades. It includes fourteen essays, written by some of the leading Roth specialists in this country and abroad."--BOOK JACKET.

This text seeks to harness the possibilities offered by the evolving collection of forces by which Jewish Studies is constituted and practiced in order to open, refashion, and exemplify possibilities for a humanities to come.

From the moment that his debut book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), won him the National Book Award, Philip Roth has been among the most influential and controversial writers of our age. Now the author of more than twenty novels, numerous stories, two memoirs, and two books of literary criticism, Roth has used his writing to continually reinvent himself and in doing so to remake the American literary landscape. This Companion provides the most comprehensive introduction to his works and thought in a collection of newly commissioned essays from distinguished scholars. Beginning with the urgency of Roth's early fiction and extending to the vitality of his most recent novels, these essays trace Roth's artistic engagement with questions about ethnic identity, postmodernism, Israel, the Holocaust, sexuality, and the human psyche itself. With its chronology and guide to further reading, this Companion will be essential for new and returning Roth readers, students and scholars.

Looking at Philip Roth's writing life as a "book of voices," Debra Shostak listens in on the conversations that this prominent American novelist has conducted with himself and his times over forty years and twenty-four books. She finds that while Roth frequently shifts perspectives, he repeatedly returns to interrelated questions of cultural history, literary history, and, especially, selfhood.