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Start giftingThe 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 bookās evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the mind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the skeptical, enveloping intelligence that calculates the price thatās paid in the struggle to change personal fortune and reshape history, whether in a dentistās office in suburban New Jersey, a tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire, a church in Londonās West End, or a tiny desert settlement in Israelās occupied West Bank.
Philip Roth (1933ā2018) was one of the most decorated writers in American history, having won the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, and many more. He also won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union and in the same year received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six years āfor the entire work of the recipient.ā
Malcolm Hillgartner is an accomplished actor, writer, and musician. Named an AudioFile Best Voice of 2013 and the recipient of several Earphones Awards, he has narrated over 175 audiobooks.
Reviews
āMagnificentā¦I hope The Counterlife felt, as Mr. Roth wrote it, like a triumph, because that is certainly how it reads to me.ā
āNo other writer combines such a surface of colloquial relaxation and even dishevelment with such a dense load of mediating intelligenceā¦.Roth has never written more scrupulously or, in spots, more lovingly.ā
āRoth is a comic geniusā¦.In this book (wonderfully sharp, worryingly intense) he is an electrifier.ā
āDisenfranchisement, re-creation, and the severe guilt of independence are the I beams of Rothās Zuckerman booksāof which this is oneābut never has the ceiling vaulted so high, the aim been so nervyā¦Certainly Rothās most complex, ambitious workāand one of his best.ā
āRoth has written a puzzle, but one with passion and purpose.ā
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