| Product Summary | | Format: Hardcover | | ISBN: 9780547239699 | | Publisher: Hough | | Publish Date: 11/2/2009 | | Buy.com Sku: 211287742 | | Item#: | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 68426 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 7.5H x 5L x 0.5T |
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| | | Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Roth''s startling new book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his 60s, Axler has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance.
Annotation:
Philip Roth's 30th novel is slim but devastating, the story of an aging actor, Simon Axler, who realizes that all his finest performances--both on the stage and in life--are long behind him. His great roles are forgotten, his wife has left him, he is the subject of ridicule, and his mind is filled with raving. Roth once again delves deep into one of his favorite themes--the soul's losing battle against the ravages of time. And, being a Roth novel, this battle is inextricably intertwined with erotic obsession. Barely over a hundred pages long, THE HUMBLING has the force of a brilliant one-act, one-man soliloquy performed on a darkening stage. At 76, the Pulitzer Prize winner has lost none of his literary fire.
| Praise| "Roth observes much...in little space, and the svelte narrative amounts to an unsparing confrontation of self." (starred review) 08/10/2009 "[Roth] may be 76, but he's been on an audacious hot streak for a dozen years. THE HUMBLING....[is] a good, not great, book--an entertaining inquiry into the relationship between sex and creativity, sex and age, and sex and the ego." - Jeff Giles 10/30/2009 "The novel, bleak, uncertain, and full of fear, finds traction in familiar Rothian interrogations--of the self's deviousness, the impossible murkiness of motive, and the performative nature of identity--and it is these which produce the book's cruelest apprehension..." 11/02/2009 "[A]nother unflinching, sobering look at the pull between seizing and ceding control...THE HUMBLING...is a swift but piercing, uncluttered but nuanced morality tale....[that] blooms brightly in the extraordinarily fecund garden of [Roth's] late work." - Heller McAlpin 10/28/2009 "Roth is a master, and relentless....[He] is a language wizard and a stern moral judge, and the message he's recently been bringing us about the process of getting old subverts the traditional mythology. In EVERYMAN, EXIT GHOST and now THE HUMBLING, age does not bring wisdom to characters, and foresight fails to protect them." - Richard Rayner 11/01/2009 |
| Author Bio| Philip Roth | | Philip Roth is the son of an insurance manager (Milton Roth, whose life is described in his son's book PATRIMONY) from Newark, New Jersey. He grew up in Newark and earned both critical praise and popular success for his first book, GOODBYE, COLUMBUS, a novella and collection of short stories published in 1959. Roth has published a number of novels since then as well as an autobiography. He has been one of the leading American novelists of the late 20th century, and many of his novels have caused controversy for their unvarnished, often satirical depictions of Jewish Americans, neurosis, sexual obsession, and the writing life. |
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