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  • Published: 30 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446401286
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

Zuckerman Unbound




Reissued in electric new backlist style in October 2016, Zuckerman Unbound is the second in Philip Roth's famous series of Zuckerman Books

Following the wild success of his novel, Carnovsky, Nathan Zuckerman has been catapulted into the literary limelight. As he ventures out onto the streets of Manhattan he finds himself accosted on all sides, the target of admonishers, advisers, would-be literary critics, and – worst of all – fans.

An incompetent celebrity, ill at ease with his newfound fame, and unsure of how to live up to his fictional creation’s notoriety, Zuckerman flounders his way through a high-profile affair, the disintegration of his family life, and fends off the attentions of his most tenacious fan yet, as the turbulent decade of the sixties draws to a close around him.

But beneath the uneasy glamour are the spectres of the recently murdered Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and an unsettled Zuckerman feels himself watched…

  • Published: 30 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446401286
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 240

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 Zuckerman Unbound

It is a) funny, b) sparkling prose, c) to-the-point short, d) genuinely moving.

Financial Times

Masterful

New York Times Book Review

It was bold of Roth to write a novel about being famous...a comic stroll in the hall of mirrors

Newsweek

Fluent, funny

Daily Telegraph, Christmas round up

[Roth's] narrative hand is wonderfully sure, his comic timing worthy of the Ritz Brothers... Not since Henry MIller has anyone learned to be as funny and compassionate and brutal and plaintive in the space of a paragraph

Village Voice

Elegant and furious... Witty, tender and brutal in a single paragraph

Melvyn Bragg

A comic stroll in a hall of mirrors

Newsweek