Explore the vast range of titles available.

Reading these three outstanding novels, one feels entitled to use the fictional data included to improve or modify one’s knowledge of crucial events such as the Vietnam War, McCarthyism or Clinton's peculiar second term. Zuckerman is Tarnopol's creation. [...]the former didn't seem to have such a great future in Roth's fictional world. In Zuckerman Bound Nathan was born and reared in Camden, New Jersey, not Newark; his father is a chiropodist, not a “shoedog”; he now has a younger brother, Henry, instead of an older brother, Sherman, or a sister, Sonia; he has attended the University of Chicago, not a small liberal arts college; he is a writer, not a teacher; and his three marriages, all ending in divorce, have been to exemplary women, as recalled (not dramatized) in The Anatomy Lesson. [...]Thomas Pughe noted that Nathan's voice in the first novel of the tetralogy makes him sound like “a wiser man than the writer we encounter in the subsequent novels, perhaps with the exception of The Counterlife” (Pughe 86).

He can't consummate his desire, but he still feels it. He tries to cope with impotence by pretending that he's past feeling, ''until I came in contact for barely an hour with a beautiful, privileged, self-possessed, languid-looking thirty-year-old made enticingly vulnerable by her fears and I experience the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again.'' So you should be grateful it's only work your father wants to get back to. Don't ask him to quell his inspirations. Like [Nathan Zuckerman], he'll soon realise what he can and can't do.

The question is directed at Coleman Silk (Anthony Hopkins), who readily coughs up the answer: peripeteia. If anyone knows peripeteia, it is Silk -- and not just because he is a former classical literature professor at nearby Athena College. Even [Nathan Zuckerman], the film's narrator and Silk's sole friend at this point, questions the wisdom of taking up with Faunia. Director Robert Benton (\"Kramer vs. Kramer,\" \"Places in the Heart\") lets Faunia and Silk's relationship grow slowly and subtlety before the audience's eyes like a desert flower surrounded by a hostile environment. What we write off as improbable at first soon becomes a small flame of hope.

The opportunity presents itself when Silk, inquiring after two students who have failed to turn up for a single class, asks: \"Do they exist or are they spooks?\" Well, they do exist and are, in fact, African-Americans. It is 1998 and political correctness has reached the zenith of its stupidity. The remark is conveniently ripped out of context and Silk finds himself embroiled in controversy over uttering \"a racial epithet.\" It costs him his job and subsequently his wife, who dies from the strain of the incident. A chance meeting with a self-described \"white-trash cleaning woman,\" Faunia Farley (Nicole Kidman), leads Silk into a torrid affair and yet another scandalous situation. Half his age, abused since childhood and brazenly self-destructive, Faunia proves to be Silk's Achilles heel. She is indirectly to blame for the deaths of her two children (the remains of which she keeps in boxes under her bed) and her estranged husband Lester (Ed Harris)--recently released from a veterans' administration mental hospital--has vowed to kill her and her lover.

Did anyone believe Philip Roth when, earlier this year, he announced that he was retiring from writing? Of all contemporary novelists, he is the one who has made writing seem a necessary and continuous act, inextricable from the continuities and struggles of being alive. For Roth, narration and self seem to have been born together; and, therefore, must die together, too. More than any other modern novelist, he has used fiction as confession and the displacement of confession: his ranters, complainers and alter egos, from Portnoy to [Nathan Zuckerman] to Mickey Sabbath all seem Rothian, even when they are only standing in for Roth.

EDS: This story moves as part of the CNS weekly features package.

The three novels were published together in 1985 as a trilogy with an epilogue, ''The Prague Orgy,'' in a volume titled ''[Nathan Zuckerman] Bound.'' In ''The Prague Orgy,'' a short novel, Zuckerman visits that city and encounters the meaning of being a writer in a Communist country.

Too often, those years become the grim and fearful world that John Updike, who died in January, described through his characters in his final volume of stories -- a time of standing unsteadily on the brink of old age, increasingly separated from old friends and associates, depleted by bad health, and preoccupied with the approaching void, the final step where \"death is real, and dark, and huge.\"

We first met Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth alter-ego and would-be man of letters, in The Ghost Writer nearly 30 years ago.