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The Human Stain
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  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446400531
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384

The Human Stain

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Aug 2019
Paperback
4 May 2001
EBook
1 June 2011
Audiobook
14 Mar 2024
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Reissued in electric new backlist style, The Human Stain is one of Philip Roth's bestselling novels and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

'An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand'- Sunday Telegraph

Philip Roth's brilliant conclusion to his eloquent trilogy of post-war America - a magnificent successor to American Pastoral and I Married a Communist
It is 1998, the year America is plunged into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town a distinguished classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues allege that he is a racist. The charge is unfounded, the persecution needless, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser.

Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman.

It is Zuckerman who comes upon Silk's secret, and sets out to unearth his former buried life, piecing the biographical fragments back together. This is against backdrop of seismic shifts in American history, which take on real, human urgency as Zuckerman discovers more and more about Silk's past and his futile search for renewal and regeneration.
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PRAISE FOR THE HUMAN STAIN:
'One of the most beautiful books I've ever read' Red
'[A] tender, shocking and incendiary story on the failure of the American dream refracted through the prism of race' Guardian
'A masterpiece' Mail on Sunday
  • Published: 1 June 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446400531
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384

About the author

Philip Roth

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), but it was his fourth, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) which secured his reputation as one of America’s finest writers, and American Pastoral (1997) which 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.
portrait photo of Philip Roth

Also by Philip Roth

The Plot Against America
Nemesis
Exit Ghost
I Married a Communist
The Dying Animal
The Humbling
Indignation
See all

Praise for The Human Stain

The Human Stain pulses with the strengths that make Roth a prime contender for the status of the most impressive novelist now writing in and about America

Sunday Times

One of his very best... There are passages of such sustained brilliance here that I found myself going over them again and again in gaping disbelief. An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand

Sunday Telegraph

One of the most beautiful books I've ever read

Red

An extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand'

Sunday Telegraph

A novel so furious in its telling, with a plot so intricate in its construction that it is infused with a kind of diabolic joy. A masterpiece

Mail on Sunday

[A] tender, shocking and incendiary story on the failure of the American dream refracted through the prism of race

Arifa Akbar, Guardian

One of his very best -There are passages of such sustained brilliance here that I found myself going over them again and again in gaping disbelief. The Human Stain is an extraordinary book - bursting with rage, humming with ideas, full of dazzling sleights of hand. The work of a genius at full throttle

Sunday Telegraph

A novel with an almost Victorian range of scope and characters, all powered by one vast secret and a frenetic and exciting plot-The Human Stain is a novel so furious in its telling, with a plot so intricate in its construction that it is infused with a kind of diabolic joy. A masterpiece

Mail on Sunday

The Human Stain pulses with the strengths that make Roth a prime contender for the status of the most impressive novelist now writing in and about America

Sunday Times