The Dying Animal by Philip Roth

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The Dying Animal by Philip Roth

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The Dying Animal by Philip Roth

The unforgettable story of an affair between a star lecturer at a New York college and the beautiful daughter of Cuban exiles--and the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss that ensues--from the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral.

"[A] disturbing masterpiece." --The New York Review of Books


No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. With these words our most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college--as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete's critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.

The agency of Kepesh's undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous and humblingly beautiful 24-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged--helplessly, bitterly, furiously--into jealousy and loss. In chronicling this descent, Philip Roth performs a breathtaking set of variations on the themes of eros and mortality, license and repression, selfishness and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.

In 1997, PHILIP ROTH (1933-2018) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton, and in 2002, he was given the Gold Medal in Fiction by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which had previously been given to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He was the recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award on two occasions. The Conspiracy Against America won the Society of American Historians' prize for the best historical book on an American theme in 2003-2004, as well as the W.H. Auden Award. In 2005, Roth became the third living American writer to have his works published in a full, definitive edition by the Library of America, making him the first writer to win the prize twice in the prize's forty-six-year history.

In 2011, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, and he went on to win the Man Booker International Award for the fourth time. In 2012, he earned Spain's highest accolade, the Prince of Asturias Award, and in 2013, he was named Commander of the Legion of Honor, France's highest decoration.

SKU Unavailable
ISBN 13 9780375714122
ISBN 10 037571412X
Title The Dying Animal
Author Philip Roth
Series Vintage International
Condition Unavailable
Binding Type Paperback
Publisher Random House USA Inc
Year published 2002-07-09
Number of pages 176
Prizes Winner of Man Booker International Prize 2011
Cover note Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.