The Counterlife

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 miind 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, or in a tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire, or in a church in London's West End, or in a tiny desert settlement in Israel's occupied West Bank.

In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for <b>Patrimony</b> (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for <b>Operation Shylock</b> (1993), the National Book Award for <b>Sabbath's Theater</b> (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for <b>American Pastoral</b> (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for <b>I Married a Communist</b> (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 <b>The Counterlife</b> (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, <b>Goodbye, Columbus</b> (1959). In 2000 he published <b>The Human Stain</b>, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological eth