Philip Roth has 26 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 23 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.3★ across 106 ratings. The most-rated is The Plot Against America.
The Plot Against America
Summary
In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history. In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected president. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism. For one boy growing up in Newark, Lindbergh's election is the first in a series of ruptures that threaten to destroy his small, safe corner of America - and with it his mother, his father, and his older brother.
©2004 Philip Roth (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
American Pastoral
Summary
Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 1998Philip Roth presents a vivid portrait of an innocent man being swept away by a current of conflict and violence in his own backyard - a story that is as much about loving America as it is hating it. Seymour "Swede" Levov, a legendary high school athlete, a devoted family man, a hard worker, and the prosperous heir of his father's Newark glove factory comes of age in thriving, triumphant postwar America. But everything he loves is lost when the country begins to run amok in the turbulent 1960s. Not even a most private, well-intentioned citizen, it seems, gets to sidestep the sweep of history. American Pastoral is the story of a fortunate American's rise and fall ... a strong, confident man, a master of social equilibrium, overwhelmed by the forces of social disorder. For the Swede is not allowed to stay forever blissful living out life in rural Old Rimrock in his 170 year-old stone farmhouse with his pretty wife (his college sweetheart and Miss New Jersey of 1949) and his lively albeit precocious daughter, the apple of his eye ... that is until she grows up to become a revolutionary terrorist.
©1997 Philip Roth (P)1997 by Dove Audio, (P) 2014 by Phoenix Books
The Human Stain
Summary
It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for 50 years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America." As an added bonus, when you purchase our Audible Modern Vanguard production of Philip Roth's book, you'll also receive an exclusive Jim Atlas interview. This interview – where James Atlas interviews Judith Thurman about the life and work of Philip Roth – begins as soon as the audiobook ends.
©2001 Philip Roth (P)2009 Audible, Inc.
I Married a Communist
Summary
Winner of the 1999 Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union in Fiction Iron Rinn, born Ira Ringold, is a Newark roughneck, a radio actor, an idealistic Communist, and an educated ditchdigger turned popular performer. A six-foot, six-inch Abe Lincoln lookalike, he emerges from serving in World War II passionately committed to making the world a better place and instead winds up blacklisted, unemployable, and ruined by a brutal personal secret from which he is perpetually in flight. His life is in ruins. On his way to political catastrophe, he marries the nation's reigning radio actress and beloved silent film star, Eve Frame (born Chava Fromkin). Their marriage evolves from glamorous, romantic idyll to a disparaging soap opera of tears and treachery when Eve's dramatic revelation to gossip columnist Bryden Grant of her husband's life of espionage with the Soviet Union soon twists the couple's private drama into a national scandal. I Married a Communist is an American tragedy as only Philip Roth can conceive...fierce and comical, eloquently rendered, and definitely accurate.
©1998 Philip Roth (P)1998, 2015 NewStar Media, Phoenix Books
The Ghost Writer
Summary
The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the great books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. If she were, it might change his life. The first volume in the Zuckerman Bound trilogy and epilogue, The Ghost Writer is about the tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency - and about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other.
©1979 Philip Roth (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Goodbye, Columbus
Summary
Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin - he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills - meet one summer and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella, the first book published by Philip Roth, explores issues of both class and Jewish assimilation into American culture. It won the National Book Award in 1960.
©1993 Phillip Roth (P)2009 Phoenix
Sabbath's Theater
Summary
National Book Award, Fiction, 1995Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Mickey Sabbath at 64 is an aging, raging powerhouse, defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his longtime mistress, Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Haunted by the ghosts of all the people who loved and hated him the most, Sabbath contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction. Acclaimed author Philip Roth is at the very peak of his creative powers in this bold and hilarious novel, a comic creation of epic proportions.
©1995 by Philip Roth (P)1995 by Dove Audio, Inc.
Operation Shylock
Summary
What if a look-alike stranger stole your name, usurped your biography, and went about the world pretending to be you? In Operation Shylock, master novelist Philip Roth confronts his double, an impostor whose self-appointed task is to lead the Jews back to Europe from Israel. The "fake" Philip Roth becomes a monstrous nemesis to the "real" Philip Roth, who must take a frightening and mysterious journey through the volatile Middle East. Suspenseful, hilarious, and impassioned, Operation Shylock is at once a spy story, a political thriller, and a confession, pulsing with intelligence and intense narrative energy.
©1993 Philip Roth (P)1993 Dove Audio, Inc.
The Anatomy Lesson
Summary
At 40, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious affliction - pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman, whose work was his life, is unable to write a line. Now his work is trekking from one doctor to another, but none can find a cause for the pain or assuage it. Zuckerman himself wonders if the pain could have been caused by his own books. And while he is wondering, his dependence on painkillers grows into an addiction to vodka, marijuana, and Percodan. The third volume in the Nathan Zuckerman series, The Anatomy Lesson provides some of the funniest scenes in all of Roth's fiction - as well as some of the fiercest.
©2013 Philip Roth (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Zuckerman Unbound
Summary
Now in his mid-thirties, Nathan Zuckerman, a would-be recluse despite his newfound fame as a best-selling author, ventures onto the streets of Manhattan in the final year of the turbulent 60s. Not only is he assumed by his fans to be his own fictional satyr, Gilbert Carnovsky ("Hey, you do all that stuff in that book?"), he also finds himself the target of admonishers, advisors, and sidewalk literary critics. The recent murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. lead an unsettled Zuckerman to wonder if "target" may be more than a figure of speech. In Zuckerman Unbound, the second volume in a trilogy, the notorious novelist Nathan Zuckerman retreats from his oldest friends, breaks his marriage to a virtuous woman, and damages his affectionate connection to his younger brother - all because of his recent good fortune.
©2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.; 2016 Philip Roth
The Counterlife
Summary
The Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate. Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book's evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the mind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the skeptical, enveloping intelligence that calculates the price that's paid in the struggle to change personal fortune and reshape history, whether in a dentist's office in suburban New Jersey, a tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire, a church in London's West End, or a tiny desert settlement in Israel's occupied West Bank.
©2016 Philip Roth (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Dying Animal
Summary
Philip Roth, one of the best-known and award winning literary masters of our time, engages his readership with insightful and challenging novels of the human condition. With The Dying Animal, he revisits the character David Kepesh. At age 60, Kapesh is drawn out of his carefully ordered existence and into an obsessive affair with one of his students.
©2001 Philip Roth (P)2008 Recorded Books
Everyman
Summary
There is no more decorated American writer living today than Philip Roth, the New York Times best-selling author of American Pastoral, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. He has won a Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, two PEN/Faulkner Awards, and numerous other distinctions. The hero of Everyman is obsessed with mortality. As he reminds himself at one point, "I'm 34! Worry about oblivion when you're 75." But he cannot help himself. He is the ex-husband in three marriages gone wrong. He is the father of two sons who detest him, despite a daughter who adores him. And as his health worsens, he is the envious brother of a much fitter man. A masterful portrait of one man's inner struggles, Everyman is a brilliant showcase for one of the world's most distinguished novelists.
©2006 Philip Roth (P)2006 Recorded Books, LLC.
The Breast
Summary
Like a latter-day Gregor Smasa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed. But where Kafka's protagonist turned into a giant beetle, the narrator of Philip Roth's richly conceived fantasy has become a 155-pound female breast. What follows is a deliriously funny yet touching exploration of the full implications of Kepesh's metamorphosis - a daring, heretical book that brings us face to face with the intrinsic strangeness of sex and subjectivity.
©1972 Philip Roth (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
Portnoy et son complexe
Summary
Entre les grands idéaux humanitaires qui l'animent et les obsessions inavouables qui le hantent, Alex Portnoy, trente-trois ans, est la proie d'un insoluble conflit. Élevé dans le quartier israélite de Newark, par des parents abusifs, démesurément attachés aux principes de la tradition juive-américaine, ligoté par des tabous et des interdits, submergé de conseils et d'exhortations, il est écrasé par une culpabilité d'autant plus angoissante que la sexualité et ses déviations les plus extrêmes ne cessent de l'obnubiler. Brillant étudiant, puis fonctionnaire en vue, il n'en reste pas moins un "bubala", un bébé, aux yeux de ses parents qui lui reprochent amèrement son indépendance, sa froideur apparente et surtout son refus de fonder un foyer et d'assurer la descendance. Ce livre audio, à la fois féroce et désopilant, où la tendresse alterne avec le cynisme, l'humour avec le pathétique, est une mordante satire de l'ignorance, du racisme, des préjugés et de l'intolérance sous toutes ses formes.
©1970 Editions Gallimard (P)2019 Editions Gallimard
Indignation
Summary
In 1951, the second year of the Korean War, a studious, law-abiding, and intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, begins his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at a local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hardworking neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad - mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees on every corner for his beloved boy. Far from Newark, Marcus has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world. Indignation, Philip Roth's 29th book, is a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in Roth's recent books and a powerful exploration of a remarkable moment in American history.
©2008 Philip Roth (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Professor of Desire
Summary
As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself "a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes". Little does he realize how prophetic this motto will be - or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a ménage a trios in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a supremely intelligent, affecting, and often hilarious novel about the dilemma of pleasure: where we seek it; why we flee it; and how we struggle to make a truce between dignity and desire.
©1994 Philip Roth (P)2009 Brilliance Audio, Inc.
The Prague Orgy
Summary
In quest of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, the American novelist Nathan Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s. There, in a nation straightjacketed by totalitarian Communism, he discovers a literary predicament, marked by institutionalized oppression, that is rather different from his own. He also discovers, among the oppressed writers with whom he quickly becomes embroiled in a series of bizarre and poignant adventures, an appealingly perverse kind of heroism. The Prague Orgy, consisting of entries from protagonist Nathan Zuckerman's notebooks recording his sojourn among these outcast artists, completes the Nathan Zuckerman series. It provides a startling ending to Roth's intricately designed magnum opus on the unforeseen consequences of art.
©2016 Philip Roth (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Patrimony
Summary
Patrimony, a true story, touches the emotions as strongly as anything Philip Roth has ever written. Roth watches as his 86-year-old father - famous for his vigor, his charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections - battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. The son, full of love, anxiety, and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father's long, stubborn engagement with life. Philip Roth is hailed by many as the reigning king of American fiction. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, this memoir about love, survival, and memory is one of his most intimate books, but also one of his most intellectually vigorous. Patrimony is Roth's elegy to his father, written with piercing observation and wit at the height of his literary prowess.
©2016 Philip Roth (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Great American Novel
Summary
Gil Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire. The ex-con first baseman John Baal, “The Babe Ruth of the Big House,” who never hit a homerun sober. If you’ve never heard of them—or of the Ruppert Mundy’s, the only homeless big-league ball team in American history—it’s because of the Communist plot and the capitalist scandal that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory. In this ribald, richly imagined, and wickedly satiric novel, Philip Roth turns baseball’s status as national pastime and myth into the occasion for unfettered picaresque farce, replete with heroism, perfidy, ebullient wordplay, and a cast of characters that includes the House Un-American Activities Committee.
©1995 Phillip Roth (P)2010 Brilliance Audio, Inc.