The Professor of Desire

Description

Philip Roth's entire oeuvre - 31 books - to be reissued in electric new Vintage jackets for October 2016 As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself as 'a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes' - an identity that will cling to him for a lifetime. As Philip Roth follows Kapesh from the domesticity of childhood out into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a menage trois in London to the depths of loneliness in New York, Kapesh confronts the central dilemma of pleasure- how to make a truce between dignity and desire; and how to survive the ordeal of an unhallowed existence.

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.

Philip Roth is a great historian of modern eroticism * Milan Kundera * A thoughtful, even gentle, stylistically elegant novel about the paradox of male desire, that lacerating passion which may lead to happiness but cannot survive it * New York Times Book Review * He writes so well. His prose is both elegant and furious. It can be witty, tender and brutal in a single paragraph -- Melvyn Bragg No one writing can juggle the somber and the ludicrous more adroitly than Roth * The Time * A profound and commanding book... There is great beauty in it, humanity and tenderness * Sunday Telegraph *