Operation Shylock
A Confession
Philip Roth
WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD
Wildly suspenseful and unexpectedly hilarious, Operation Shylock is the daring offspring of a propulsive spy story, a meditation on identity politics, an auto-fictional reckoning, and a confrontation with a volatile, nightmarish time in history. In 1988, Philip Roth arrives in a Jerusalem thrown into chaos. The First Intifada has begun, and the country is equally enraptured and disturbed by the groundbreaking, televised trial of infamous Nazi camp guard, John Demjanjuk. Amidst the mayhem, Roth encounters a man who has set out to spread "Diasporism," a strange new ideology that advocates for a reverse-exodus of Ashkenazi Jews. Even more bizarre: This activist is also named Philip Roth, looks a lot like Philip Roth, and claims he is a celebrity author who has written all the same books as Philip Roth... Roth is intent on stopping him, even if that means impersonating his own impersonator.
"One of Roth's grand inventions.... [He is] a comic genius." —The New York Review of Books
“The uncontested master of comic irony.” —Time magazine
“A brilliant novel of ideas … Roth has gone farther into his own genius than he ever has before.” —Nation
"Nothing short of stunning." —London Review of Books
"An astoundingly accomplished piece of work." —The Guardian
"Diabolically clever, engaging. . . . [A] white-water unstoppable narrative. . . . Roth is so splendidly convincing. . . that the result is kind of a dizzying exhilaration." —The Boston Globe
About the Author
Philip Roth (1933–2018) was one of the most prolific and provocative American novelists of the twentieth century. Born in Newark, New Jersey, the city that anchors much of his fiction, he made his debut with Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award in 1960. He went on to publish more than thirty books, among them Portnoy's Complaint, The Ghost Writer, American Pastoral, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. His recurring alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman and David Kepesh, allowed him to probe Jewish American identity, desire, mortality, and the pressures of history with relentless candor. Roth received the National Jewish Book Award three times, the National Book Award twice, the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the Man Booker International Prize, and the National Medal of Arts. He retired from writing in 2012 and died in New York in 2018.