Philip Roth's Final Hours

Philip Roth's Final Hours

Sale price  $26.96 Regular price $29.95
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Philip Roth's Final Hours

Philip Roth's Final Hours

Sale price  $26.96 Regular price $29.95

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Philip Roth's Final Hours

Timothy Parrish

Literary Criticism / Jewish

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.

Timothy Parrish is Professor of Comparative Literature at University of California, Davis, USA, and a Pushcart Prize–nominated writer and critic. His publications include The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth (2007), Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America (2012), and From the Civil War to the Apocalypse: Postmodern History and American Fiction (2008). His fiction and criticism have appeared in Ploughshares, Raritan Contemporary Literature, Vestal Review, Arizona Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, and American Literary History.

Publication Date: 13 May 2027
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN-13: 9798216444473
Format: Paperback softback
Page Count: 272
Weight (oz): 16.0

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