The Breast
A Novel
Philip Roth
In Philip Roth's brilliant take on The Metamorphosis, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed—into a 155-pound breast. Like a latter-day Gregor Samsa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed. But where Kafka's protagonist turned into a giant beetle, the narrator of Philip Roth's richly conceived fantasy has become a 155-pound female breast. What follows is a deliriously funny yet touching exploration of full implications of Kepesh's metamorphosis--a daring heretical book that brings us face to face with the intrinsic strangeness of sex and subjectivity.
"Terrific...inventive and sane and very funny. The trick which is the heart of the book is brilliant...and rich with meaning." —New York Times Book Review
"Hilarious, serious, visionary, logical, sexual-philosophical; the ending amazes." —Cynthia Ozick
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.