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  • Published: 1 November 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099535652
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $28.00

The Humbling




Philip Roth's entire oeuvre - 31 books - to be reissued in electric new Vintage jackets for October 2016

Simon Axler is one of America's leading classical stage actors, but his talent - his magic - has deserted him. All the spontaneity and unthinking impulsiveness that made him great has been replaced by a paralysing self-consciousness. Overwhelmed, Axler's wife promptly leaves him, and Axler checks into a psychiatric hospital. It is only when he begins an affair with Pegeen - formerly a lesbian of 17 years - that Axler's regeneration (and then his final catastrophe) can begin.

  • Published: 1 November 2010
  • ISBN: 9780099535652
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $28.00

About the author

Philip Roth

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933. The second child of second-generation Americans, Bess and Herman Roth, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. After graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, where he received a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature.

In 1959, Roth published Goodbye, Columbus – a collection of stories, and a novella – for which he received the National Book Award. Ten years later, the publication of his fourth novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, brought Roth both critical and commercial success, firmly securing his reputation as one of America’s finest young writers. Roth was the author of thirty-one books, including those that were to follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, and a fictional narrator named Philip Roth, through which he explored and gave voice to the complexities of the American experience in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.

Roth’s lasting contribution to literature was widely recognised throughout his lifetime, both in the US and abroad. Among other commendations he was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the International Man Booker Prize, twice the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.

Philip Roth died on 22 May 2018 at the age of eighty-five having retired from writing six years previously.

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Praise for The Humbling

Slim, fast-moving, sometimes funny but mostly bleak read...original and unsettling

The Times

Roth is no longer a novelist of comic exuberance, but of thoughtful meditation about life and increasingly death; he is our surviving laureate of lateness. His new work will not detain you long, but it will linger

Telegraph

His most savage and unrelenting work yet... (Roth) has lost neither his voice nor his power to shock

Sunday Herald

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 cruellest apprehension: The failures were his, as was the bewildering biography on which he was impaled

New Yorker

Roth's late prodigious burst of creativity continues

Metro

Roth...knows no limits, which is part of the fun of reading him

New Stateman

Adds to his reputation as one of American literature's greats

The Times

While the other big beasts of his literary generation lost it one by one, Roth has enjoyed a flowering of late form barely seen since Yeats.

Literary Review

There is a clarity, almost a ruthlessness, to his work, which makes the experience of reading any of his books a bracing, wild ride... He is the last of the giants

The Times

This is another dark and wonderfully written meditation on life and love by one of American's greatest living writers

Bookseller

Told with the customary subtle, spare and beautiful prose that is Roth's mark

Tablet

At his best when things are at worst

Daily Express

The great man of American literature still flashes with brilliance

Sunday Express

Witty and provocative

Daily Mail

Roth scores a palpable hit

Economist

I read everything by Philip Roth... As he's got older he's writing these incredible, unflinching books about the ageing process

The Word

Wonderful touches

Sunday Times

The Humbling is a stark triptych of breakdown, rehabilitation and outcome that reprises recent themes of loss, ageing and sexual potency

Financial Times

The book's prose is pure Roth, perfect and precise... While Roth's Humbling may be occasionally implausible, his humbling (small "h") has been more real: since publication, critics have attacked this book, suggesting that Roth, like Axler, has "lost his magic". He hasn't. There are definitely some silly moments here but there are also some perfect ones. Roth's talent is, unlike Axler's, far from dead

The Times

A grimly funny commentary of the universal drama of ageing

The Times

A literary colossus, whose ability to inspire, astonish and enrage his readers is undiminished'

Washington Post