2009 - books
Explore the best books of 2009 with our curated list of top titles across genres. Discover must-read fiction, non-fiction, and award-winning releases from this iconic year.
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American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century—a compulsively readable elegy for America’s promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss, and "one of Roth's most powerful novels ever" (The New York Times). Here is Philip Roth's masterpiece, featuring Nathan Zuckerman and the story of Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him. For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of domestic terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longed-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, American Pastoral gives us Philip Roth at the height of his powers.
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Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse
An autobiographical novel featuring Harry Haller in "an experimental mix of symbolism, realism, and fantasy."--Cover.
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Operation Shylock
by Philip Roth
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.
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Portnoy's Complaint
by Philip Roth
The groundbreaking novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral that originally propelled its author to literary stardom: told in a continuous monologue from patient to psychoanalyst, this masterpiece draws us into the turbulent mind of one lust-ridden young Jewish bachelor named Alexander Portnoy. One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years “Deliciously funny . . . absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious . . . a brilliantly vivid reading experience”—The New York Times Book Review “Touching as well as hilariously lewd . . . Roth is vibrantly talented”—New York Review of Books Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.
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Rabbit, Run
by John Updike
“A lacerating story of loss and of seeking, written in prose that is charged with emotion but is always held under impeccable control.”—Kansas City Star Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.
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The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The chilling bestselling alternate history novel of what happens to one family when America elects a charismatic, isolationist president whose government embraces anti-Semitism—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral. “A terrific political novel.... Sinister, vivid, dreamlike...You turn the pages, astonished and frightened.” —The New York Times Book Review One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century In an extraordinary feat of narrative invention, Philip Roth imagines an alternate history where Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the 1940 presidential election to heroic aviator and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh. Shortly thereafter, Lindbergh negotiates a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, while the new government embarks on a program of folksy anti-Semitism.
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Goodbye, Columbus
by Philip Roth
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From the Pulitzer Prize–winnning writer of explosive wit, merciless insight, and a fierce compassion comes "a masterpiece" (Newsweek) that illuminates the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora. Roth's award-winning first book instantly established its author's reputation. Goodbye, Columbus is the story of Neil Klugman and pretty, spirited Brenda Patimkin, he of poor Newark, she of suburban Short Hills, who meet one summer break and dive into an affair that is as much about social class and suspicion as it is about love. The novella is accompanied by five short stories that range in tone from the iconoclastic to the astonishingly tender.