Operation Shylock - (Vintage International) by Philip Roth (Paperback)

About the Book

In this fiendishly imaginative, dizzyingly paced bestseller, Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Someone with that name has been touring the State of Israel, promoting a bizarre exodus in reverse, and it is up to Roth to stop him--even if that means impersonating his impersonator.

Book Synopsis

WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD - From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral--a fiendishly imaginative book that features Israeli intelligence agents, Palestinian exiles, an accused war criminal, and an enticing charter member of an organization called Anti-Semites Anonymous

"One of Roth's grand inventions.... [He is] a comic genius." --The New York Review of Books

In this book (which may or may not be fiction), Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring Israel, promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews. Roth is intent on stopping him, even if that means impersonating his own impersonator.

With excruciating suspense, unfettered philosophical speculation, and a wild cast of characters, Operation Shylock barrels across the frontier between fact and fiction, seriousness and high comedy, history and nightmare.

Review Quotes

A Time Magazine Best American Novel

"One of Roth's grand inventions.... [He is] a comic genius ... a living master." --Harold Bloom, The New York Review of Books

"The uncontested master of comic irony." --Time magazine

"A devilish book, nervously exuding a kind of delirious brilliance like sweat at every pore, and madly comic." --Alfred Kazin

"A brilliant novel of ideas ... Roth has gone farther into his own genius than he ever has before." --Ted Solotaroff, The Nation

About the Author

PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. 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. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians' Prize for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004." Roth received PEN's two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018.