The Human Stain

Philip Roth author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Published:5th Apr '01

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The Human Stain cover

'The work of a genius at full throttle' Sunday Telegraph

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, but the truth about Silk would astonish even his most virulent accuser.

'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

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

  • Winner of WH Smith Literary Prize 2001
  • Winner of WH Smith Annual Literary Award 2001
  • Short-listed for Irish Times Literary Prize,International Fiction 2001

ISBN: 9780099282198

Dimensions: 197mm x 129mm x 24mm

Weight: 270g

384 pages