Deception

by Philip Roth

Overview

“With the lover everyday life recedes,” Roth writes—and exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, he presents in Deception the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction. This chilling and unconventional novel is about the infidelity of language itself, as told through the tender whispers, heated arguments and loaded words of two lovers attempting to escape from their spouses, their histories and themselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781623730048
Publisher:	Odyssey Editions
Publication date:	01/04/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	219 KB

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

Conversations, most of them between an American writer living in London and his English mistress, make up what PW called ``a clever comedy of manners that segues--as is the author's wont--into a disquisition on the distinction between literature and life.'' (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Philip, a successful, middle-aged, and highly opinionated Jewish-American novelist, moves to a small flat in London to work on his new book. He begins seeing a married Englishwoman in his spare time, and soon he has filled a notebook with their pre- and post-coital conversations. When he publishes this document as a novel, his indignant mistress accuses him of deceiving both her and his public. The book ends with Philip's impassioned defense of self-referential fiction. The issue, however, is not self-referential fiction in general but simply Roth's own peculiar version of it, which consists mostly of unabashed editorializing through the mouthpiece of Philip. A textbook example of the novel as soapbox, Deception will appeal only to Roth's most steadfast supporters. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/90. --Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles

Library Journal

"This swift, elegant, disturbing novel ... stands at the extreme of contemporary fiction." —The New York Times Book Review

"Deception is itself deceptive, as elegant and ingenious as anything in The Ghost Writer or The Prague Orgy." —Hermione Lee, New Repubic

"A fiendishly clever piece of work ... an amazing feat.... He's invented the purest speech, the most convincing cadences, of any American novelist." —William Pritchard, Hudson Review

From the Publisher