A flatlay of some of James Baldwin's most notable works. 

Phillip20Roth-best-books-main.jpg

Reading lists

Where to start with Philip Roth

For writers, weddings are the perfect settings to create high drama

wedding-in-books.jpg

The greatest wedding scenes in fiction

vintage-article-promo-safe-area-tht.jpg

What to read after The Handmaid’s Tale

American Pastoral

The renowned Pulitzer Prize-Winning novel

New to Vintage Classics, this is the Pulitzer-prize winning novel that exposed the American psyche. Still profoundly resonant today, it confirmed Philip Roth as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.

Full of insight, full of sharp ironic twists, full of wisdom about American idealism, and full of terrific fun... A profound and personal meditation on the changes in the American psyche over the last fifty years

A tragedy of classical proportions...a magnificent novel

Brilliantly written...angry, grieving, witty, acute...compellingly and convincingly rendered

Utterly tragic and compelling. It's one of the greatest modern American novels

Philip Roth’s American Pastoral is one of those books you know is going to change you in some profound way shortly after you start reading it and it did for me. I read it last summer and nothing has quite surpassed it for me since. A very painful read.

[American Pastoral] is gorgeously written with passages of breathtaking beauty filled with wisdom and pathos

Philip Roth was one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century. Born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. He attended Bucknell University, Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, receiving a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature. 
 
In 1959, Roth published his first book Goodbye, Columbus 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. Roth was the author of thirty-one books 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.

'A tragedy of classical proportions...a magnificent novel' The Times 
 
Discover the Pulitzer-prize winning novel that confirmed Philip Roth as one of the greatest American writers. 
 
'Swede' Levov is living the American dream. 
 
He glides through life cocooned by his devoted family, lucrative business, sporting prowess and good looks. He is the embodiment of thriving, post-war America, land of liberty and hope. 
 
Until one sunny day in 1968, when Swede's daughter, Merry, commits an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism and the Levov family is plunged into mayhem. Extraordinarily nuanced and poignant, American Pastoral is the first in an eloquent trilogy of post-war American novels that still resonates today. 
_________________ 
 
PRAISE FOR AMERICAN PASTORAL: 
'Angry, grieving, witty, acute' Sunday Times 
'A profound and personal meditation on the changes in the American psyche over the last fifty years' Financial Times 
'A momentous novel' Observer 
'Utterly tragic and compelling' Tatler

The Human Stain

New to Vintage Classics, this is Roth’s brilliant conclusion to his eloquent trilogy of post-war America – a magnificent successor to American Pastoral and I Married a Communist

The Human Stain pulses with the strengths that make Roth a prime contender for the status of the most impressive novelist now writing in and about America

One of his very best... There are passages of such sustained brilliance here that I found myself going over them again and again in gaping disbelief. An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand

A novel so furious in its telling, with a plot so intricate in its construction that it is infused with a kind of diabolic joy. A masterpiece

[A] tender, shocking and incendiary story on the failure of the American dream refracted through the prism of race

One of the most beautiful books I've ever read

Philip Roth was one of the greatest authors of the twentieth century. Born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933, Roth grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood he was to return to time and again in his writing. He attended Bucknell University,Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, receiving a scholarship to complete his M.A. in English Literature. 
 
In 1959, Roth published his first book Goodbye, Columbus 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. Roth was the author of thirty-one books 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.

The American psyche is channelled into the gripping story of one man. This is the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Philip Roth at his very best. 
 
It is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president. In a small New England town a distinguished professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues allege that he is a racist. The charge is unfounded, the persecution needless, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret that he has kept for fifty years. This is the conclusion to Roth’s brilliant trilogy of post-war America – a story of seismic shifts in American history and a personal search for renewal and regeneration. 
 
'An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand' Sunday Telegraph

Everyman

Reissued in electric new backlist style, Everyman is one of Philip Roth's late masterpieces and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

Shimmers with the mysteries and regrets of a whole life...poignant, droll, and eloquent

Capable of altering the way you see the world

Alive with literary brilliance for all its deathly subject matter

Roth's writing looks uncompromisingly straightforward but is subtle and clever... A human story for our times

The genius of this short, bleak, remarkable novel stems from the way that Roth turns his desolate assessment of death into something bracing: an angry acceptance that mortality is the price we pay for the sheer wonder of this thing called life

Every sentence and every paragraph works with the coiled precision of the watch mechanisms that the narrators father repairs and glitters with the lapidary perfection of the perfection he sells

A simple beautiful ending to a deeply sombre book

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.

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 
 
Everyman is a candidly intimate yet universal story of loss, regret and stoicism. 
 
The novel takes its title from a classic of early English drama, whose theme is the summoning of the living to death. 
 
The fate of Roth's everyman is traced from his first shocking confrontation with death on the idyllic beaches of his childhood summers, through the family trials and professional achievements of his vigorous adulthood, and into his old age when he is stalked with physical woes. 
 
The terrain of this powerful novel is the human body. Its subject is the common experience that terrifies us all.

A Novelist's Autobiography

The Facts

Reissued in electric new backlist style, The Facts is Philip Roth's idiosyncratic memoir

The Facts is a lively and serious version of a novelist's life

A fine account of the origin of Roth's fiction - Philip Roth continues to be the most vigorous and truthful of American writers

How does a novelist write about the facts of his life after spending years fictionalising those facts with irrepressible daring and originality? 
 
What becomes of 'the facts' after they have been smelted down for art's sake? In The Facts - Philip Roth's idiosyncratic autobiography - we find out. Focusing on five episodes in his life, Roth gives a portrait of his secure city childhood in Newark, through to his first marriage, clashes with the Jewish establishment over Goodbye, Columbus and his writing of Portnoy's Complaint. In true Rothian style, his fictional self Nathan Zuckerman is allowed the final, coruscating word of reply.

Exit Ghost

Reissued in electric new backlist style, Exit Ghost is the final book in Philip Roth's famous Nathan Zuckerman series

There are few writers who write with such power of the loss of powers

If its subject embraces mortality, its sentences ring with vitality, and Roth reminds us why "the transforming exigencies of prose fiction" still matter even as the light begins to die

Taken together the Zuckermam novels read as both a noisy New Jersey Kaddish for 50 years of American History and an extraordinary contemporary "Song of Myself"

At his best, Philip Roth constructs his novels from huge blocks of material, to produce an effect that is overpowering

Here is a noble revelation of the curel vulnerability of the body we live in without choice

Consistently enthralling...full of tart humour and dancing intelligence

Nobody who has followed him - one of the great writers of our time - thus far, should miss it

There is something magnificent about Philip Roth's undimmed rage and life-lust... As a body of work, these novels may have changed the way that readers think about their own mortality and may also have enlarged their sense of what it means to be a man; and one hopes that even E.I. Lonoff might consider that a fair tribute to the power of art

This is a book about the importance of literature that lasts

Returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman - incontinent and impotent - comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Walking the streets he quickly makes several connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. In a rash moment, he offers to swap homes with a young couple. And from the moment he meets them, Zuckerman wants to exchange his solitude for the erotic allure of the young woman Jamie, who draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, and the play of heart and body. 
 
Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.

My Life as a Man

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

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

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

A scalding, unique addition to the lasting literature about men and women

A fiction-within-a-fiction, My Life as a Man centres on the fraught marriage of Peter, a gifted young writer and Maureen Tarnopol, the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead becomes his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and powered by moral blackmail. And yet, the the couple's relationship 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 scorching truths, acts of weakness and shocking cruelty, Philip Roth creates a fierce tragedy about a fatal impasse between a man and a woman.

Philip Roth

A passionate and coruscating American tragedy

Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity

One of the great political novels of our age; a card-carrying Shakespearean tragedy with New Jersey dirt beneath its fingernails

A magnificent novel of ideas, a disquisition on the fallout of the death of ideology

Roth explores our expedients and tragedies with a masterly, often unnerving, blend of tenderness, harshness, insight and wit...a gripping novel

Roth remains as edgy, as furious, as funny, and as dangerous as he was forty years ago

I Married a Communist proves that, following the success of Sabbath's Theater and American Pastoral, he remains on extraordinary form... Wonderful storytelling and characterisation

The McCarthy era has faded, eerily, into nostalgia, just as Capitol Hill produces its own 90s version of witch-hunt and communal obsession with enemies of the state, and perversions of justice perpetrated in democracy's name. Roth avoids nostalgia by making his narrator an active, if unwitting participant in the original drama, caught up in political currents and counter-currents he did not comprehend at the time

Roth’s conflicted, many-layered characters give this work memorable force

The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Philip Roth turns his gaze on 30s and 40s America in this magnificent successor to American Pastoral. 
 
Ira Ringold is an American roughneck who transforms himself from a ditch-digger in 1930s New Jersey, to a radio hotshot in the 1940s. In his heyday as a star – and as a bullying supporter of 'progressive' political causes – Ira marries Hollywood's leading lady, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon is short-lived, however, and it is the publication of Eve's scandalous bestselling exposé that identifies Ira as 'an American taking his orders from Moscow'. In this story of cruelty, betrayal, and revenge friends become deadly enemies, parents and children estranged, lovers blacklisted and the great felled from vertiginous heights. 
 
‘Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity’ Mail on Sunday 
 
‘A passionate and coruscating American tragedy’ Financial Times

Philip Roth

Praise for I Married a Communist

A passionate and coruscating American tragedy

Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity

One of the great political novels of our age; a card-carrying Shakespearean tragedy with New Jersey dirt beneath its fingernails

A passionate and coruscating American tragedy

Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity

One of the great political novels of our age; a card-carrying Shakespearean tragedy with New Jersey dirt beneath its fingernails

A passionate and coruscating American tragedy

Knotted with energy, barely wasting a scene or word in its cracking velocity

One of the great political novels of our age; a card-carrying Shakespearean tragedy with New Jersey dirt beneath its fingernails

Books by Philip Roth

Articles featuring Philip Roth

Where to start with Philip Roth

The greatest wedding scenes in fiction

What to read after The Handmaid’s Tale

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter