The Counterlife

Name: The Counterlife
ISBN: 9780063499720

A Novel

Philip Roth

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER

The Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate.

Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book's evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the mind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the skeptical, enveloping intelligence that calculates the price that's paid in the struggle to change personal fortune and reshape history, whether in a dentist's office in suburban New Jersey, or in a tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire, or in a church in London's West End, or in a tiny desert settlement in Israel's occupied West Bank.

“Magnificent … splendid…. I hope The Counterlife felt, as Mr. Roth wrote it, like a triumph, because that is certainly how it reads to me.” —New York Times Book Review

“Roth is a comic genius…. In this book (wonderfully sharp, worryingly intense) he is an electrifier.” —Martin Amis, The Atlantic

“No other writer combines such a surface of colloquial relaxation and even dishevelment with such a dense load of mediating intelligence…. Roth has never written more scrupulously or, in spots, more lovingly.” —John Updike, The New Yorker

"Boisterously serious, dense, fizzing and formally audacious…The final thing that needs to be said about The Counterlife…is that it’s fucking funny." —Julian Barnes, London Review of Books

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.