Roth Unbound

Roth Unbound has two particularly strong selling points. It is the first full-length study to be published since Roth’s announcement that Nemesis would be his final novel. It is therefore the first to cover what currently looks to be his entire oeuvre… Secondly, Roth has made himself available as a commentator on – if not wholly a collaborator with – Pierpont’s project, with the result that her account of his life and works is supplemented with marginal illuminations from her subject himself. – Bharat Tandon * Literary Review *
A celebration… an illuminating companion to Roth’s work. * Economist *
The first study of the complete oeuvre… Roth collaborated with [Pierpont], answering questions, contributing asides as she writes. The effect is surreal. Ten pages of Pierpont’s sparky prose can go by without interruption. Then she’ll say, “Speaking today about this encounter, Roth remarks…” as if the great man has been sitting by her side all the time, peering to see the sentences unfold, his breath in her ear. – John Walsh * Sunday Times *
[Pierpont] binds the books to the man not by mining them for nuggets of autobiographical information but by talking to Roth himself about what he put into them, by which she doesn’t mean the facts, but the territory of imagination and self that creates fiction… What Pierpont has achieved is to defeat speculation. Whatever we think we know, turns out to be wrong. – Linda Grant * Independent *
Pierpont knows her (somewhat inaccessible) subject and has punctuated her narrative with conversational snippets. A must for fans. – Rachel Cooke * Observer *
[Pierpont’s] appraisal is the first of its kind to defend Roth in any depth… As an old-fashioned critical biography, Roth Unbound has much new to say about the novelist’s life and work. – Ian Thomson * Financial Times *
A lucid, tender, illuminating study, beautifully poised between intimacy and detachment. – Caroline Moore * Spectator *
Sympathetic, astute and observant… This is not a conventional biography…it is a 300-plus page profile, drawing on what is palpably a mutually respectful friendship. – Alan Taylor * Herald *
The closest thing yet to a biography of the US’ greatest living writer. After years of interviews, the author has as much to say about Roth’s life (he dated Jackie Kennedy) as his extraordinary body of work. – Olivia Cole * GQ *
In its sense of emotion recollected in tranquillity it captures the seductive humanity of Roth the writer and man, and not far from the surface, still just enough of what his whoring hero Mickey Sabbath called “preposterone”, that obscenely generative spark that has brought his words to such vivid life. – Tim Adams * Guardian *

Claudia Roth Pierpont is a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she has written about the arts for more than twenty years. Her articles have covered subjects ranging from James Baldwin to Katharine Hepburn, and from Machiavelli to Mae West.

In 2000, Pierpont published Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World, a collection of her essays on women writers, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She has also received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library.

Pierpont holds a PhD in Italian Renaissance art history from New York University and lives in New York City.

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