The Human Stain

Reissued in electric new backlist style, The Human Stain is one of Philip Roth's bestselling novels and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction'An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand'- Sunday TelegraphPhilip Roth's brilliant conclusion to his eloquent trilogy of post-war America - a magnificent successor to American Pastoral and I Married a CommunistIt is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town a distinguished classics 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, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman.It is Zuckerman who comes upon Silk's secret, and sets out to unearth his former buried life, piecing the biographical fragments back together. This is against backdrop of seismic shifts in American history, which take on real, human urgency as Zuckerman discovers more and more about Silk's past and his futile search for renewal and regeneration.____PRAISE FOR THE HUMAN STAIN-'One of the most beautiful books I've ever read' Red' A tender, shocking and incendiary story on the failure of the American dream refracted through the prism of race' Guardian'A masterpiece' Mail on Sunday

Winner of WH Smith Literary Prize 2001
Winner of WH Smith Annual Literary Award 2001
Short-listed for Irish Times Literary Prize,International Fiction 2001

“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”

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 Sunday Times
An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand' Sunday Telegraph
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 Sunday Telegraph
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 Mail on Sunday
[A] tender, shocking and incendiary story on the failure of the American dream refracted through the prism of race -- Arifa Akbar Guardian

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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