My Life as a Man

by Philip Roth

Overview

The Pulitzer Prize–winning, internationally acclaimed author of American Pastoral delivers a fierce tragedy of sexual need and blindness. • "Roth's best.” —Newsweek

A fiction-within-a-fiction, a labyrinthine edifice of funny, mournful, and harrowing meditations on the fatal impasse between a man and a woman, My Life as a Man is Roth's most blistering novel.

At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol, a gifted young writer and the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen's death, Peter is still trying—and failing—to write his way free of it. Out of desperate inventions and cauterizing truths, acts of weakness, tenderheartedness, and shocking cruelty, Philip Roth creates a work worthy of Strindberg.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679748274
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/13/1994
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	684,777
Product dimensions:	5.14(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.” Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018.

Hometown:

Connecticut

Date of Birth:

March 19, 1933

Place of Birth:

Newark, New Jersey

Education:

B.A. in English, Bucknell University, 1954; M.A. in English, University of Chicago, 1955

Editorial Reviews

"Roth's best.... No writer alive can sustain a full-length novel at as high a decibel level as Philip Roth." —Newsweek

"[My Life as a Man is] a scalding, unique addition to the lasting literature about men and women." —Newsday

"A very grand work ... in invention, in perception ... in coming to grips with the wild inconsistencies of life and art." —New York Times

From the Publisher

Roth’s best…No writer alive can sustain a full-length novel at as high a decibel level as Philip Roth.”

Newsweek

Roth’s 1974 work—finally available on audio—bursts into life with Dan John Miller’s exceptional performance. The first section, “Useful Fictions,” consists of two entertaining short stories, which Miller performs well. The second section, the majority of the work, “My True Story,” is Peter Tarnopol’s first-person “memoir” of his rocky, emotionally wrought marriage to Maureen. Miller’s performance of this portion of the book is scintillating. His depictions of the battles and other emotionally charged moments between this couple are so vivid and realistic that listeners will feel as though they’re spying on their conflicted lives. The scene in which Peter’s unbridled hatred of Maureen erupts, leading to Maureen’s emotional and physical responses, is an audiobook triumph. D.J.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2011 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

MAY 2010 - AudioFile