The Dying Animal

Author: Philip Roth

Stock information

General Fields

  • : $26.95 NZD
  • : 9780099422693
  • : Penguin Random House
  • : Vintage
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  • : March 2002
  • : United Kingdom
  • : 27.99
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  • : books

Special Fields

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  • : Philip Roth
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  • : Paperback
  • : New edition
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  • : English
  • : 813.54
  • :
  • : 156
  • : Modern fiction
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Barcode 9780099422693
9780099422693

Description

David Kepesh is a white haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college, when he meets Consuela Castillo, a decorous, well-mannered student of twenty-four, the daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who promptly puts his life into erotic disorder and haunts him for the next eight years. Since the sexual revolution of the 1960's freed him from his wife and child, Kepesh has experimented with living what he calls an emancipated manhood beyond the reach of family or a mate. Over the years, he had refined that exuberant decade of protest and licence into an orderly way of life in which he is both unimpeded in the world of Eros and studiously devoted to his aesthetic pursuits. But the youth and beauty of this newly hatched woman a masterpiece as Kepesh describes Consuela, of 'volupte' - undo him completely. His worldliness, his confidence, his reason desert him, and on the brink of old age, a maddening sexual possessiveness transports him to the depths of deforming jealousy. The lighthearted erotic tale with which he began evolves into a poignant, tragic story of love and loss.

Promotion info

'This is a vicious, furious book, unapologetically not of this age-it is also horribly funny and unflinchingly honest' New Statesman 20020220

Author description

In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six years "for the entire work of the recipient".