Each chapter introduces the work or works under discussion, provides a brief summary of the story, and moves on to a lively analysis of its various literary elements and its significance in Roth's overall body of work.

Introduction Still Resonant, Revelant, and Crazy After All These Years: Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories by Jessica G. Rabin Female Hysteria and Sisterhood in Letting Go and When She Was Good by Julie Husband Getting in Your Retaliation First: Narrative Strategies in Portnoy's Complaint by David Brauner Philip Roth, MVP: Our Gang, The Breast, and The Great American Novel by Anne Margaret Daniel My Life as a Man: The Surprises Manhood Brings by Margaret Smith How to Tell a True Ghost Story: The Ghost Writer and the Case of Anne Frank by Aimee Pozorski The Ghosts of Zuckerman's Past: The Zuckerman Bound Series by Alexis Kate Wilson En-Countering Pastorals in The Counterlife by Bonnie Lyons Caught between The Facts and Deception by Richard Tuerk The Measure of All Things: Patrimony by Benjamin Hedin Operation Shylock: Double Double Jewish Trouble by Elaine B. Safer A Little Stranger in the House: Madness and Identity in Sabbath's Theater by Ranen Omer-Sherman Pastoral Dreams and National Identity in American Pastoral and I Married a Communist by Derek Parker Royal Becoming Black: Zuckerman's Bifurcating Self in The Human Stain by Tim Parrish Professing Desire: The Kepesh Novels by Kevin R. West It Can Happen Here, or All in the Family Values: Surviving The Plot Against America by Alan Cooper The "Written World" of Philip Roth's Nonfiction by Darren Hughes Bibliography

Offering 17 original essays, this excellent collection makes a fine addition to the substantial body of critical and scholarly work on this important author….Each of the well-written essays deals with one or several of Roth's works, so the book as a whole presents the reader with a chronologically organized survey of virtually all Roth's books, including his biographical and critical writings. The scope and depth of the book are illuminated in the themes that recur throughout, among them, in Ross's words, the joining of the public and the private in Roth's fiction and autobiography, and, in Parker Royal's words, the ways in which American identity and Jewish ethnicity are negotiated. Enhanced by an extensive bibliography, this book provides a sophisticated but accessible introduction to the Roth canon. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

"Royal's new anthology of critical essays on Philip Roth is a timely addition to the growing library of books to weigh in on Roth as our most important contemporary novelist....The editor's charge to his writers was to start afresh, make it new, and so they have. The contributors have learned from Roth himself how to be at once weighty and brisk, informed and bold. These essays are admirably readable, and are framed expertly by Professor Royal's introduction and concluding bibliography. To the student of Philip Roth's writing, beginning or well advanced, I can say confidently, Start here."

"Royal's new anthology of critical essays on Philip Roth is a timely addition to the growing library of books to weigh in on Roth as our most important contemporary novelist...The editor's charge to his writers was to start afresh, make it new, and so they have. The contributors have learned from Roth himself how to be at once weighty and brisk, informed and bold. These essays are admirably readable, and are framed expertly by Professor Royal's introduction and concluding bibliography. To the student of Philip Roth's writing, beginning or well advanced, I can say confidently, Start here." -- Mark Shechner, author of Up Society's Ass Copper: Rereading Philip Roth "It is a book of revelations, in which original, sympathetic and well-informed readings of Roth's major works...provide fascinating insights into the achievement of one of America's most important writers that will be of interest to both students and scholars." -- Bernard F. Rodgers Jr., Emily H. Fisher Professor of Literature, Simon's Rock College of Bard "The most comprehensive and up-to-date collection of essays available... He has included work by some of the best Roth critics and scholars... The essays are mostly each on a single work but written intertextually so that readers get a sense of Roth's development and growth as a novelist. This will be extremely useful for students at every level as well as for the general reader who wants to understand and appreciate Roth's fiction." -- Jay L. Halio, Professor of English Emeritus, University of Delaware, author of Philip Roth Revisited "The first collection of essays that both illuminates and expands our critical understanding of all Roth's major and minor writings. It will be of equal interest to both the Roth specialist and the general reader." -- Ben Siegel, Professor of English, California State Polytechnic University, Ponoma, author of Turning Up the Flame: Philip Roth's Later Novels "Royal's collection is a broad ranging and timely critical reassessment of the Roth oeuvre by major scholars who examine with freshness and brilliance Roth's postmodern treatment of such contemporary issues as gender, ethnicity, Jewishness, metafiction, the problematics of the American dream, American history, the status of truth, and Roth's many-layered narrative masks. Lively, erudite, substantive, sophisticated and elegantly edited. This is a major contribution to the study of one of postmodern America's major living writers." -- Gloria L. Cronin, Editor: Saul Bellow Journal, Executive Coordinator, American Literature Association, Co-Director, Jewish American and Holocaust Literature Association