Returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman - incontinent and impotent - comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Walking the streets he quickly makes several connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. In a rash moment, he offers to swap homes with a young couple. And from the moment he meets them, Zuckerman wants to exchange his solitude for the erotic allure of the young woman Jamie, who draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, and the play of heart and body.
Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.
Philip Roth (1933-2018) won the Pulitzer Prize forAmerican Pastoralin 1997.In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House, and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005The Plot Against Americareceived the Society of American Historians Prize for the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 20032004.
Roth received PENs two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award for a body of work . . . of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose scale of achievement over a sustained career . . . places him or her in the highest rank of American literature. In 2011 Roth won the International Man Booker Prize.