Henry Roth has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators. The most-rated is Call It Sleep.
Mercy of a Rude Stream
Summary
This "landmark of the American literary century" (Boston Globe) is finally published as one volume, appearing with a brilliant new introduction. Sixty years after the publication of his great modernist masterpiece, Call It Sleep, Henry Roth, a retired waterfowl farmer already in his late eighties, shocked the literary world with the announcement that he had written a second novel. It was called, he reported, Mercy of a Rude Stream, the title inspired by Shakespeare, and it followed the travails of one Ira Stigman, whose family had just moved to New York's Jewish Harlem in that "ominous summer of 1914". "It is like hearing that... J. D. Salinger is preparing a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye," the New York Times Book Review pronounced, while Vanity Fair extolled Roth's new work as "the literary comeback of the century." Even more astonishing was that Roth had not just written a second novel but a total of four chronologically linked works, all part of Mercy of a Rude Stream. As the story unfolds, we follow the turbulent odyssey of Ira, along with his extended Jewish family, friends, and lovers, from the outbreak of World War I through his fateful decision to move into the Greenwich Village apartment of his muse and older lover, the seductive but ultimately tragic NYU professor Edith Welles. Set in both the fractured world of Jewish Harlem and the bohemian maelstrom of the Village, Mercy of a Rude Stream echoes Nabokov in its portrayal of sexual deviance, and offers a harrowing and relentless family drama amid a grand panorama of New York City in the 1910s and Roaring 20s.
©2014 Joshua Ferris. Mercy of a Rude Stream, Volume I: A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park 1994 Henry Roth. Mercy of a Rude Stream, Volume II: A Diving Rock on the Hudson 1995 Henry Roth. Mercy of a Rude Stream, Volume III: From Bondage 1996 The Estate of Henry Roth. Mercy of a Rude Stream, Volume IV: Requiem for Harlem 1998 The Literary Estate of Henry Roth. Editor's Afterword 1998 Robert Weil. (P)2014 Audible Inc.
Call It Sleep
Summary
Lauded as the most profound novel of Jewish life ever written by an American, Call It Sleep seamlessly weaves together the searing pains and subtle joys of immigrant life in New York’s Lower East Side. It is the story of David Schearl, a dangerously imaginative little boy who arrives from Eastern Europe in 1907. Shock by shock, he is exposed to the blows - and occasional pleasures - of life in the crowded tenements.
©1962 Henry Roth (P)1994 Recorded Books, LLC