A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park: Mercy Of A Rude Stream Volume 1 - A masterpiece, not remotely like anything else in American literature'

(Paperback)

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Returning to the milieu of Call It Sleep, Jewish Harlem at the beginning of the century, Roth introduces us to 14 year-old Ira Stigman and his extended family. It is 1914 and the family must contend with the impact of war on themselves and their homelands. Ira has other issues - sexuality the racism of his peers, a bullying and failed father, the search for his own identity...

Reviews

The Ur-novel at the heart of American literature - Mercy of a Rude Stream is a towering achievement -- Junot Diaz
Henry Roth has only two peers in American-English Jewish fiction, Nathanael West and Philip Roth * Harold Bloom *
The literary comeback of the century * Vanity Fair *
A masterpiece ... It is not remotely like anything else in American literature.... It is this pitiless examination of a writer grappling with his demons, at the highest reaches of his intellectual capacity, that gives Mercy of a Rude Stream its ferocious passion.... It is the exhilaration felt by a man who has cast off six decades of self-repression and finally feels himself free * The New York Review of Books *
Roth creates his own Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man--a marvelously poetic chronicle * Chicago Sun-Times *
Mr. Roth's innovative use of language is both beautiful and highly realistic ... Although there is no style called Rothian, there should be * New York Times Book Review *
This novel is as unquenchably vibrant with life as the immigrants whose existence it commemorates * Sunday Times *
A genuine publishing event ... unbeatable in [its] drama, tension and feeling * Literary Review *

Author Bio

In 1994 Henry Roth broke his sixty-year literary silence following his classic novel CALL IT SLEEP, with the publication of volume one of MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM, called A STAR SHINES OVER MT. MORRIS PARK. This four-volume series was hailed as 'unsurpassable' in the annals of twentieth-century American literature. Henry Roth died aged 89 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in October 1995.