Our Gang: Starring Trick and His Friends

Description

Philip Roth's entire oeuvre - 31 books - to be reissued in electric new Vintage jackets for October 2016 'Disturbing, logical and very funny... In short, a masterpiece' New York Times Book Review A ferocious political satire in the great tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, Our Gang is Philip Roth's brilliantly acerbic response to the phenomenon of Richard M. Nixon. In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth portrays an American president who outdoes the severest cynic; a peace-loving Quaker and believer in the sanctity of human life who doesn't have a problem with killing unarmed women and children. A master politician with an honest sneer, he finds himself battling the Boy Scouts, declaring war on pro-pornography Denmark, all the time trusting in the basic indifference of the voting public. Tricky is the unprincipled self-seeker who hides his heartlessness behind the anaesthetising cliches of high office, whose public language is a merciless parody of that 'candid' Presidential prose which is merely double-talk, or as Orwell put it, 'pure wind'.

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.

The uncontested master of comic irony * Time * Very funny - I laughed out loud sixteen times and giggle internally a statistically unverifiable amount. In short, a masterpiece... I cant think of anything like it * New York Times * A bitter yet hilarious lampoon...a remarkable display of satiric vehemence. An extremely (in every sense) funny, nail-bitingly anxious work * Financial Times * When Philip Roth sends Richard Nixon to hell in Our Gang, there is delight in recognising that if there is a hell, Nixon will probably act there just as Roth describes him * Washington Post * Perhaps the funniest and most complex exercise in sustained political satire since Animal Farm * Newsweek *