The Breast.

ROTH, Philip.

$250.00

Item Number: 1625

New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972.

Uncorrected proof of the author’s comic novella which features David Kapesh’s transformation into a 155 pound breast. Octavo, original wrappers. Signed by Philip Roth on the title page. In very good condition.

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).