Synopses & Reviews
Like a latter-day Gregor Samsa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed. But where Kafka's protagonist turned into a giant beetle, the narrator of Philip Roth's richly conceived fantasy has become a 155-pound female breast. What follows is a deliriously funny yet touching exploration of the full implications of Kepesh's metamorphosis—a daring, heretical book that brings us face to face with the intrinsic strangeness of sex and subjectivity.
Synopsis
Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed into a 155-pound female breast. What follows, in bizarre yet hysterical Kafkaesque fashion, is a touching exploration of the full implications of Kepesh's metamorphosis--a daring, heretical book that brings us face to face with the intrinsic strangeness of sex and subjectivity.
Synopsis
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral Like a latter-day Gregor Samsa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed--into a 155-pound breast. What follows is "terrific...inventive and sane and very funny (The New York Times Book Review).
A deliriously funny yet touching exploration of the full implications of David Kepesh's metamorphosis--a daring, heretical book that brings us face to face with the intrinsic strangeness of sex and subjectivity.
Hilarious, serious, visionary, logical, sexual-philosophical; the ending amazes--the joke takes three steps beyond savagery and satire and turns into a sublimeness of pity. One knows when one is reading something that will permanently enter the culture. --Cynthia Ozick, author of Antiquities
About the Author
In the 1990s Philip Roth won Americas four major literary
awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle
Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for
Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbaths
Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for
American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book
Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist
(1998); in the same year he received the National
Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the
National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife
(1986) and the National Book Award for his first book,
Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human
Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos
of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received
his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britains W. H.
Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he
received the highest award of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six
years “for the entire work of the recipient.” In 2005 The
Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians
Award for “the outstanding historical novel on an
American theme for 20032004.” In 2007 Roth received the
PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman.