The Breast.
“For all that I announce at intervals that I want to go mad, it is apparently impossible: beyond me, beneath me. It took This for me to learn that I am a citadel of sanity”: First Edition of Philip Roth's Comic Novel The Breast; Signed by Him
The Breast.
ROTH, Philip.
$300.00
Item Number: 5724
New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972.
First edition of Roth’s first book in a series portraying the life of the fictional professor David Kapesh. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by Philip Roth on the title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket.
Like a latter-day Gregor Samsa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed. But where Kafka's protagonist turned into a giant beetle, the narrator of Philip Roth's richly conceived fantasy has become a 155-pound female breast. What follows is a deliriously funny yet touching exploration of the full implications of Kepesh's metamorphosis?a daring, heretical book that brings us face to face with the intrinsic strangeness of sex and subjectivity. "Hilarious, serious, visionary, logical, sexual-philosophical; the ending amazes—the joke takes three steps beyond savagery and satire and turns into a sublimeness of pity. One knows when one is reading something that will permanently enter the culture" (Cynthia Ozick).
