‘A landmark of the American literary century’ Boston Globe
Sixty years after the publication of his great modernist masterpiece, Call It Sleep, Henry Roth returned with Mercy of a Rude Stream – a sequence of four internationally-acclaimed epic novels of immigrant life in early-twentieth century New York.
In Henry Roth’s extraordinary novel we are introduced to Ira Stigman and his dazzlingly-evoked immigrant world of New York’s Jewish Harlem. It is 1914 and the news of the outbreak of war is the first of many events to impinge on Ira’s life and that of his family. Here is a boy struggling with racism, with his raging and unpredictable father, with the unsettling emergence of sexuality and with a world in the grip of momentous change.
‘The literary comeback of the century’ Vanity Fair
‘As unquenchably vibrant with life as the immigrants whose existence it commemorates’ Sunday Times
‘A dynamic and moving event . . . a stirring portrait of a vanished culture . . . a poignant chapter in the life-drama of a unique American writer’ Newsweek
‘Although it is sixty years since a new novel by Mr Roth last hit the bookshelves, it has been worth the wait’ The Economist
‘Fresh and touching’ Wall Street Journal
‘A precision of detail which brings the sounds from the tenements, the heat of the sidewalk steaming off the pages’ Sunday Express
‘A meticulous evocation of a now-distant episode of the American experience’ New York Times Book Review
Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Complete Novels includes
1) A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park
2) A Diving Rock on the Hudson
3) From Bondage
4) Requiem for Harlem.
Sixty years after the publication of his great modernist masterpiece, Call It Sleep, Henry Roth returned with Mercy of a Rude Stream – a sequence of four internationally-acclaimed epic novels of immigrant life in early-twentieth century New York.
In Henry Roth’s extraordinary novel we are introduced to Ira Stigman and his dazzlingly-evoked immigrant world of New York’s Jewish Harlem. It is 1914 and the news of the outbreak of war is the first of many events to impinge on Ira’s life and that of his family. Here is a boy struggling with racism, with his raging and unpredictable father, with the unsettling emergence of sexuality and with a world in the grip of momentous change.
‘The literary comeback of the century’ Vanity Fair
‘As unquenchably vibrant with life as the immigrants whose existence it commemorates’ Sunday Times
‘A dynamic and moving event . . . a stirring portrait of a vanished culture . . . a poignant chapter in the life-drama of a unique American writer’ Newsweek
‘Although it is sixty years since a new novel by Mr Roth last hit the bookshelves, it has been worth the wait’ The Economist
‘Fresh and touching’ Wall Street Journal
‘A precision of detail which brings the sounds from the tenements, the heat of the sidewalk steaming off the pages’ Sunday Express
‘A meticulous evocation of a now-distant episode of the American experience’ New York Times Book Review
Mercy of a Rude Stream: The Complete Novels includes
1) A Star Shines Over Mt. Morris Park
2) A Diving Rock on the Hudson
3) From Bondage
4) Requiem for Harlem.
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Reviews
Roth creates his own Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man--a marvelously poetic chronicle
Mr. Roth's innovative use of language is both beautiful and highly realistic ... Although there is no style called Rothian, there should be
The Ur-novel at the heart of American literature - Mercy of a Rude Stream is a towering achievement
A masterpiece ... It is not remotely like anything else in American literature.... It is this pitiless examination of a writer grappling with his demons, at the highest reaches of his intellectual capacity, that gives Mercy of a Rude Stream its ferocious passion.... It is the exhilaration felt by a man who has cast off six decades of self-repression and finally feels himself free
A genuine publishing event ... unbeatable in [its] drama, tension and feeling
This novel is as unquenchably vibrant with life as the immigrants whose existence it commemorates
Henry Roth has only two peers in American-English Jewish fiction, Nathanael West and Philip Roth
The literary comeback of the century