Reading Myself and Others [Import] [Paperback]

Philip Roth (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Corgi Books; New Ed edition (1977)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0552105090
• ISBN-13: 978-0552105095
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

More About the Author

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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Please, Mr. Roth, Update This Collection, July 5, 2000

By 

R. W. Rasband (Heber City, UT) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Reading Myself and Others (Hardcover)

Not only is Philip Roth perhaps America's greatest living novelist, he is one of the nation's very best literary critics as well. This book is a compilation of essays and interviews he published before 1974. Included is his piercing analyses of the accusations of anti-Semitism made against him as well as "Writing American Fiction", the classic essay where he declares that the novelist's imagination can't possibly keep up with the extravagance of American reality. Also included is the short story/essay "Looking at Kafka" which may be the best thing ever written about that quintessential modernist author. Roth has written enough criticism in the years since this book was published to assemble a whole new volume: please, we badly need an update!

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars He will make you laugh and he may make you cry, January 18, 2005

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Reading Myself and Others (Paperback)

Interviews, articles , essays. An essay on Kafka which turns into a moving fiction on what would have happened to Kafka had he come as a war refugee to Roth's New Jersey. Writing about the East-European authors he has championed, about the claim of the Jewish community that his writing has not served it very well, about the novel, and the American reality which in its extravagance seems to produce more than any fiction can do, an essay on The Newark Public Library one on Cambodia, on 'TheBaseball Years' on his protege Alan Lelchuk, reflections on his own books, Portnoy, the Breast, the Great American novel, Life as a Man.

A rich collection by the funniest and certainly one of the best American writers of the last half- century.