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Description

An irreverant, critical-creative story of a posthumous Philip Roth which draws on a wealth of Roth criticism, his work, and his biography to provide a new and unique take on a popular, acclaimed, and academically canonized contemporary author.

Exhausted from a lifetime of writing sentences and rearranging them, the devout atheist, Philip Roth, was looking forward to silence, oblivion, and no more crank calls from Stockholm saying he had lost the Nobel Prize, again. Alas, death is not going as he had planned.

Against his will, Roth awakens to the eternity of the Sabbath, that sanctification of time celebrated by Jewish mystics and certain members of his own family. Oy vey, the chores he's been given! Rescuing from the Nazis a Jewish writer he's never heard of (Walter Benjamin)! Reliving his traumatic battles with the musician who stole his Nobel Prize (Bob Dylan)! Confronting the unpleasant eternal presence of his most devoted reader (God)! If he does what he's told, he'll achieve the unfathomable – alter history and save his people from Hitler. Philip Milton Roth! A legendary Jew like Moses or Joshua! He'd rather be dead. He has no choice but to battle this dybbuk narrator encasing him within a Jewish story not his own.

To win back his life, and his death, Roth will try anything, even stealing his biographer's pen perhaps to begin again… In this strange novel that Roth never dreamed of writing, his complicated Jewish life is revealed in ways no conventional biography can.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Foreword

1. Roth's Final Hours
2. The Two Lives of Roth
3. The Angel of Benjamin
4. The Final Annihilation of Philip Roth
Notes
References
Index

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 01 Apr 2027
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Pages 272
ISBN 9798216444497
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Author

Timothy Parrish

Timothy Parrish is Professor of Comparative Litera…

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