From Bondage: Mercy Of A Rude Stream Volume 3 - 'A masterpiece, not remotely like anything else in American literature'

Description

Written in the last year of Roth's life, this is the impassioned story of a young man's love affair with literature, and with his teacher. As Ira Stigman turns from his childhood incestuous affairs, he finds himself competing with hisbest friend for the attention of their literature professor. From Bondage is theis the moving culmination of a great writer's life.

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.

A genuine publishing event ... unbeatable in [its] drama, tension and feeling * Literary Review * 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 *