The Facts
A Novelist's Autobiography
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
3 months free
The Facts
Buy for $16.07
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Mel Foster
-
By:
-
Philip Roth
About this listen
The unconventional autobiography of the Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author—“the most vigorous and truthful of American writers” (Newsday)—who reshaped our idea of fiction. A work of compelling candor and inventiveness, instructive particularly in its revelation of the interplay between life and art.
Philip Roth concentrates on five episodes from his life: his secure city childhood in the thirties and forties; his education in American life at a conventional college; his passionate entanglement, as an ambitious young man, with the angriest person he ever met (the “girl of my dreams” Roth calls her); his clash, as a fledgling writer, with a Jewish establishment outraged by Goodbye, Columbus; and his discovery, in the excesses of the sixties, of an unmined side to his talent that led him to write Portnoy’s Complaint.
The audiobook concludes surprisingly—in true Rothian fashion—with a sustained assault by the novelist against his proficiencies as an autobiographer.
©1988 Philip Roth (P)2024 Blackstone PublishingListeners also enjoyed...
-
Goodbye, Columbus
- And Five Short Stories
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Ramiz Monsef, Jonathan Davis, Robert Fass
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 9
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 7
-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 7
Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin. Neil comes from poor Newark, while Brenda is of suburban Short Hills. On one summer break, they meet and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
A masterpiece
- By marjorie on 10-12-24
By: Philip Roth
-
Nemesis
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 6
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 6
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 6
Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944. A javelin thrower and weightlifter, he is disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As the devastating disease begins to ravage Bucky’s playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Something to think about
- By Michael Beilenson on 08-01-24
By: Philip Roth
-
The Breast
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 1 hr and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 2
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2
-
Story3 out of 5 stars 2
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral: Like a latter-day Gregor Samsa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed—into a 155-pound breast. What follows is “terrific…inventive and sane and very funny (The New York Times Book Review).
By: Philip Roth
-
Deception
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen, David Colacci
- Length: 4 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall1 out of 5 stars 1
-
Performance1 out of 5 stars 1
-
Story1 out of 5 stars 1
With the lover everyday life recedes,” Roth writes—and exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, he presents in Deception the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction. At the center of Deception are two adulterers in their hiding place. He is a middle-aged American writer named Philip, living in London, and she is an articulate, intelligent, well-educated Englishwoman compromised by a humiliating marriage to which, in her thirties, she is already nervously half-resigned.
By: Philip Roth
-
When She Was Good
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Tanya Eby
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 2
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 2
When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With his unerring portraits of Lucy and her hapless, childlike husband, Roy, Roth has created an uncompromising work of fictional realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning, and discontent that is at once pitiless and compassionate.
By: Philip Roth
-
Doctor Faustus
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 26 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 20
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 17
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 17
Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man.
-
2 out of 5 stars
-
Literary self flagellation
- By Lipton101 on 02-13-25
By: Thomas Mann
-
Goodbye, Columbus
- And Five Short Stories
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Ramiz Monsef, Jonathan Davis, Robert Fass
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 9
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 7
-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 7
Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin. Neil comes from poor Newark, while Brenda is of suburban Short Hills. On one summer break, they meet and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
A masterpiece
- By marjorie on 10-12-24
By: Philip Roth
-
Nemesis
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 6
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 6
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 6
Bucky Cantor is a vigorous, dutiful twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944. A javelin thrower and weightlifter, he is disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. As the devastating disease begins to ravage Bucky’s playground, Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: fear, panic, anger, bewilderment, suffering, and pain.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Something to think about
- By Michael Beilenson on 08-01-24
By: Philip Roth
-
The Breast
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 1 hr and 49 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 2
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2
-
Story3 out of 5 stars 2
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral: Like a latter-day Gregor Samsa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed—into a 155-pound breast. What follows is “terrific…inventive and sane and very funny (The New York Times Book Review).
By: Philip Roth
-
Deception
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen, David Colacci
- Length: 4 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall1 out of 5 stars 1
-
Performance1 out of 5 stars 1
-
Story1 out of 5 stars 1
With the lover everyday life recedes,” Roth writes—and exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, he presents in Deception the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction. At the center of Deception are two adulterers in their hiding place. He is a middle-aged American writer named Philip, living in London, and she is an articulate, intelligent, well-educated Englishwoman compromised by a humiliating marriage to which, in her thirties, she is already nervously half-resigned.
By: Philip Roth
-
When She Was Good
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Tanya Eby
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 2
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 2
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 2
When she was still a child, Lucy Nelson had her alcoholic failure of a father thrown in jail. Ever since then she has been trying to reform the men around her, even if that ultimately means destroying herself in the process. With his unerring portraits of Lucy and her hapless, childlike husband, Roy, Roth has created an uncompromising work of fictional realism, a vision of provincial American piety, yearning, and discontent that is at once pitiless and compassionate.
By: Philip Roth
-
Doctor Faustus
- By: Thomas Mann
- Narrated by: David Rintoul
- Length: 26 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 20
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 17
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 17
Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now newly rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man.
-
2 out of 5 stars
-
Literary self flagellation
- By Lipton101 on 02-13-25
By: Thomas Mann
-
My Life as a Man
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Dan John Miller
- Length: 12 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall5 out of 5 stars 1
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 1
-
Story5 out of 5 stars 1
A fiction-within-a-fiction, a labyrinthine edifice of funny, mournful, and harrowing meditations on the fatal impasse between a man and a woman, My Life as a Man is Philip Roth’s most blistering novel. At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol, a gifted young writer and the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen’s death, Peter is still trying—and failing—to write his way free of it.
By: Philip Roth
-
The Great American Novel
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: James Daniels
- Length: 14 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
-
Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
-
Story0 out of 5 stars 0
Gil Gamesh, the only pitcher who ever literally tried to kill the umpire. The ex-con first baseman, John Baal, “The Babe Ruth of the Big House,” who never hit a home run sober. If you’ve never heard of them—or of the homeless baseball team the Ruppert Mundys—it’s because of the Communist plot, and the capitalist scandal, that expunged the entire Patriot League from baseball memory.
By: Philip Roth
-
Sabbath’s Theater
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: John Turturro
- Length: 18 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 33
-
Performance5 out of 5 stars 30
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 30
Once an inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his longtime mistress—an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring surpassed even his own—Sabbath, bereft and grieving and besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Great stand alone Roth novel.
- By Gabriel Jones Roxas on 02-06-25
By: Philip Roth
-
Indignation
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Ray Chase
- Length: 4 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 418
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 370
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 370
In 1951, the second year of the Korean War, a studious, law-abiding, and intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, begins his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at a local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hardworking neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad - mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees on every corner for his beloved boy.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Tight, beautiful and also strange and sad.
- By Darwin8u on 08-22-16
By: Philip Roth
-
Everyman
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 4 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 540
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 228
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 226
The hero of Everyman is obsessed with mortality. As he reminds himself at one point, "I'm 34! Worry about oblivion when you're 75." But he cannot help himself. He is the ex-husband in three marriages gone wrong. He is the father of two sons who detest him, despite a daughter who adores him. A masterful portrait of one man's inner struggles, Everyman is a brilliant showcase for one of the world's most distinguished novelists.
-
4 out of 5 stars
-
Full Frontal Roth
- By JOHN on 05-31-06
By: Philip Roth
-
The Professor of Desire
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 2
-
Performance3 out of 5 stars 1
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 1
As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself “a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes.” Little does he realize how prophetic this motto will be—or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a ménage à trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a novel that “ranks among the major achievements in the literature of our time”—Village Voice.
By: Philip Roth
-
Operation Shylock
- A Confession
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 16 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 10
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 7
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 7
In this book (which may or may not be fiction), Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring Israel, promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews. Roth is intent on stopping him, even if that means impersonating his own impersonator. With excruciating suspense, unfettered philosophical speculation, and a wild cast of characters, Operation Shylock barrels across the frontier between fact and fiction, seriousness and high comedy, history and nightmare.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
You'd get shamed out of town for proposing that ending in any writing workshop in America.
- By Cursh on 11-26-24
By: Philip Roth
-
The Humbling
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Dick Hill
- Length: 3 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 2
-
Performance4 out of 5 stars 2
-
Story3.5 out of 5 stars 2
Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth’s startling book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, “are melted into air, into thin air.” When he goes onstage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His confidence in his powers has drained away; he imagines people laughing at him; he can no longer pretend to be someone else.
By: Philip Roth
-
The Middle Kingdoms
- A New History of Central Europe
- By: Martyn Rady
- Narrated by: John Curless
- Length: 22 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 96
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 87
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 87
Central Europe has long been infamous as a region beset by war, a place where empires clashed and world wars began. In The Middle Kingdoms, Martyn Rady offers the definitive history of the region, demonstrating that Central Europe has always been more than merely the fault line between West and East. Even as Central European powers warred with their neighbors, the region developed its own cohesive identity and produced tremendous accomplishments in politics, society, and culture.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
Marred by the errors in the modern section
- By Paul Boothroyd on 10-20-23
By: Martyn Rady
-
American Pastoral
- American Trilogy, Book 1
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 16 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 80
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 64
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 64
Here is Philip Roth’s masterpiece, featuring Nathan Zuckerman and the story of Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father’s glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede’s beautiful American luck deserts him.
-
3 out of 5 stars
-
Let me was good. The story itself isn’t bad I guess. But…
- By Br on 05-22-25
By: Philip Roth
-
The Fixer
- A Novel
- By: Bernard Malamud
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 200
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 174
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 171
Set in Kiev in 1911 during a period of heightened anti-Semitism, the novel tells the story of Yakov Bok, a Jewish handyman blamed for the brutal murder of a young Russian boy. Bok leaves his village to try his luck in Kiev and, after denying his Jewish identity, finds himself working for a member of the anti-Semitic Black Hundreds Society. When the boy is found nearly drained of blood in a cave, the Black Hundreds accuse the Jews of ritual murder.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Technical Problems Need To Ne Resolved
- By REX LANYI on 12-24-20
By: Bernard Malamud
-
The Plot Against America
- By: Philip Roth
- Narrated by: Ron Silver
- Length: 13 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 3,546
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3,182
-
Story4.5 out of 5 stars 3,172
In an astonishing feat of empathy and narrative invention, our most ambitious novelist imagines an alternate version of American history. In 1940 Charles A. Lindbergh, heroic aviator and rabid isolationist, is elected president. Shortly thereafter, he negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.
-
5 out of 5 stars
-
Life is imitating Roth's art
- By Matthew on 08-04-16
By: Philip Roth