The Breast

(Paperback)

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Description

Philip Roth's entire oeuvre - 31 books - to be reissued in electric new Vintage jackets for October 2016 Like a latter-day Gregor Samsa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed. But where Kafka's protagonist turned into a monstrous cockroach, the narrator of Philip Roth's fantasy has become a 155-pound female breast. What follows is a deliriously funny yet moving exploration of the full implications of Kepesh's metamorphosis; audacious, heretical - as darkly hilarious as it is existentially unnerving - making new the silliness, triviality and wonderful meaninglessness of lived human experience.

Reviews

Terrific...inventive and sane and very funny * New York Times Book Review *
Roth is a living master -- Harold Bloom
Roth's prose is, as ever, elegant and intelligent, delicate even when at its most crude. It sent me back to Kafka - a brave thing to do, but he stands the comparison well -- Margaret Drabble
A new shock world of sensual possibility... Need one say again that Roth is an admirable novelist who never steps twice into the same river -- Anthony Burgess
Hilarious, serious, visionary, logical, sexual-philosophical; the ending amazes - the joke takes three steps beyond savagery and satire and turns into a sublimeness of pity. One knows when one is reading something that will permanently enter the culture -- Cynthia Ozick

Author Bio

In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians' Prize for 'the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004'. Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award 'for a body of work ... of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship' and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose 'scale of achievement over a sustained career ... places him or her in the highest rank of American literature'. In 2011 Roth won the International Man Booker Prize. Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.