The Dying Animal

Brief and brilliant – Frank Kermode * London Review of Books *
A small disturbing masterpiece * New York Review of Books *
A fierce, compacted, sometimes brutal meditation on the passing of time and the meaning of freedom * Daily Telegraph *
Written with Roth’s familiar elegance and composure * Sunday Times *
Intense and brilliant… Dazzling and compelling * Sunday Herald *
A vicious, furious book…it is also horribly funny and unflinchingly honest * New Statesman *
Another furious tirade from the most powerful and objectionable novelist currently writing… The directness of his fiction makes his contemporaries seem beside the point… Great writing * Evening Standard *
Unnerving, hilarious and sad * New York Times *
An erotic masterpiece, The Dying Animal confirms Roth As America’s president of sexual politics * GQ *

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933, to second-generation Americans Bess and Herman. He grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood his writing returned to time and again.

Roth received the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). His fourth novel, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), secured his reputation as one of America’s finest writers. American Pastoral (1997) won the Pulitzer Prize.

Roth wrote thirty-one books in all, winning the International Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. He was presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.

Roth died aged eighty-five on 22 May 2018, six years after retiring from writing.

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