Novels 1993-1995

The Library of America's definitive edition of Philip Roth's collected works continues with two novels that heralded the beginning of a more than decade-long creative explosion-one remarkable in an older writer and hailed by critics as unparalleled in American literary history.

In the diabolically imaginative Operation Shylock (1993), a character named Philip Roth encounters a look-alike who claims Roth's identity and who tours Israel promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews-proselytizing the "real" Roth is intent on stopping, even if it means impersonating his impersonator.

"This splendidly wicked book" is how the critic Frank Kermode described Sabbath's Theater (1995), a comic masterpiece of epic proportions whose gargantuan hero, Mickey Sabbath, grieving the loss of his unsurpassable mistress, embarks on a turbulent journey into his past besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most.