The Human Stain: Philip Roth

The Human Stain: Philip Roth

by PhilipRoth (Author)

Synopsis

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town an ageing classics professor, Coleman Silk is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real ruth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unravelled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of the Wall Street Journal, 'magnificently' interwoven with 'the larger public history of modern America'.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 384
Edition: 1
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 05 Apr 2001

ISBN 10: 0099282194
ISBN 13: 9780099282198
Book Overview: 'The work of a genius at full throttle' Sunday Telegraph
Prizes: Winner of WH Smith Literary Prize 2001 and WH Smith Annual Literary Award 2001. Shortlisted for Irish Times Literary Prize,International Fiction 2001.

Media Reviews
An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand' * Sunday Telegraph *
The Human Stain pulses with the strengths that make Roth a prime contender for the status of the most impressive novelist now writing in and about America * Sunday Times *
A novel so furious in its telling, with a plot so intricate in its construction that it is infused with a kind of diabolic joy. A masterpiece * Mail on Sunday *
One of his very best... There are passages of such sustained brilliance here that I found myself going over them again and again in gaping disbelief. An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand * Sunday Telegraph *
One of the most beautiful books I've ever read * Red *
Author Bio
Philip Roth (1933-2018) won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. 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 twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He 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'. 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.