{"product_id":"the-human-stain-isbn-9780375726347","title":"The Human Stain","description":"\u003cb\u003eNATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PEN\/FAULKNER AWARD • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of \u003ci\u003eAmerican Pastoral\u003c\/i\u003e delivers “a master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled modern moment\" (\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e).\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eOne of the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eColeman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of \u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal, \u003c\/i\u003e\"magnificently\" interwoven with \"the larger public history of modern America.\" | \"In American literature today, there's Philip Roth, and then there's everybody else.\"   \u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “By turns unnerving, hilarious, and sad…. It is a book that shows   how the public zeitgeist can shape, even destroy, an individual’s life…. Not only   a philosophic bookend to \u003ci\u003eAmerican Pastoral\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003ebut a large and stirring book as well.” \u003cb\u003e—Michiko   Kakutani, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Philip Roth's \u003ci\u003eThe Human Stain\u003c\/i\u003e is the best novel he   has written—not to devalue the past. Here, everything the writer has learnt and experienced   within that indefinable form we call the novel, the impact of society on himself   and the people around him, world contemporary mores, beliefs, prejudices, have come   to full realization.\"\u003cb\u003e —Nadine Gordimer, \u003ci\u003eThe Times Literary Supplement\u003c\/i\u003e (International   Book of the Year Selection)\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"A master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled   modern moment.\"\u003cb\u003e —\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e | PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for \u003ci\u003eAmerican Pastoral\u003c\/i\u003e. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ethe White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eAcademy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction.\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eHe twice won the National Book Award and the National\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eBook Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN\/Faulkner\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eAward three times. In 2005 \u003ci\u003eThe Plot Against America \u003c\/i\u003ereceived\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ethe Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ehistorical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.”\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eRoth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards:\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ein 2006 the PEN\/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN\/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003eMedal at the White House, and was later named the fourth\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003erecipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018. | \u003cb\u003eEveryone Knows\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It was in the summer of 1998 that my neighbor Coleman Silk--who,   before retiring two years earlier, had been a classics professor at nearby Athena   College for some twenty-odd years as well as serving for sixteen more as the dean   of faculty--confided to me that, at the age of seventy-one, he was having an affair   with a thirty-four-year-old cleaning woman who worked down at the college. Twice   a week she also cleaned the rural post office, a small gray clapboard shack that   looked as if it might have sheltered an Okie family from the winds of the Dust Bowl   back in the 1930s and that, sitting alone and forlorn across from the gas station   and the general store, flies its American flag at the junction of the two roads that   mark the commercial center of this mountainside town.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Coleman had first seen the   woman mopping the post office floor when he went around late one day, a few minutes   before closing time, to get his mail--a thin, tall, angular woman with graying blond   hair yanked back into a ponytail and the kind of severely sculpted features customarily   associated with the church-ruled, hardworking goodwives who suffered through New   England's harsh beginnings, stern colonial women locked up within the reigning morality   and obedient to it. Her name was Faunia Farley, and whatever miseries she endured   she kept concealed behind one of those inexpressive bone faces that hide nothing   and bespeak an immense loneliness. Faunia lived in a room at a local dairy farm where   she helped with the milking in order to pay her rent. She'd had two years of high   school education.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The summer that Coleman took me into his confidence about Faunia   Farley and their secret was the summer, fittingly enough, that Bill Clinton's secret   emerged in every last mortifying detail--every last \u003ci\u003elifelike\u003c\/i\u003e detail, the livingness,   like the mortification, exuded by the pungency of the specific data. We hadn't had   a season like it since somebody stumbled upon the new Miss America nude in an old   issue of \u003ci\u003ePenthouse\u003c\/i\u003e, pictures of her elegantly posed on her knees and on her back   that forced the shamed young woman to relinquish her crown and go on to become a   huge pop star. Ninety-eight in New England was a summer of exquisite warmth and sunshine,   in baseball a summer of mythical battle between a home-run god who was white and   a home-run god who was brown, and in America the summer of an enormous piety binge,   a purity binge, when terrorism--which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat   to the country's security--was succeeded by cocksucking, and a virile, youthful middle-aged   president and a brash, smitten twenty-one-year-old employee carrying on in the Oval   Office like two teenage kids in a parking lot revived America's oldest communal passion,   historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure: the ecstasy of   sanctimony.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In the Congress, in the press, and on the networks, the righteous grandstanding   creeps, crazy to blame, deplore, and punish, were everywhere out moralizing to beat   the band: all of them in a calculated frenzy with what Hawthorne (who, in the 1860s,   lived not many miles from my door) identified in the incipient country of long ago   as \"the persecuting spirit\"; all of them eager to enact the astringent rituals of   purification that would excise the erection from the executive branch, thereby making   things cozy and safe enough for Senator Lieberman's ten-year-old daughter to watch   TV with her embarrassed daddy again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e No, if you haven't lived through 1998, you don't   know what sanctimony is. The syndicated conservative newspaper columnist William   F. Buckley wrote, \"When Abelard did it, it was possible to prevent its happening   again,\" insinuating that the president's malfeasance--what Buckley elsewhere called   Clinton's \"incontinent carnality\"--might best be remedied with nothing so bloodless   as impeachment but, rather, by the twelfth-century punishment meted out to Canon   Abelard by the knife-wielding associates of Abelard's ecclesiastical colleague, Canon   Fulbert, for Abelard's secret seduction of and marriage to Fulbert's niece, the virgin   Heloise. Unlike Khomeini's fatwa condemning to death Salman Rushdie, Buckley's wistful   longing for the corrective retribution of castration carried with it no financial   incentive for any prospective perpetrator. It was prompted by a spirit no less exacting   than the ayatollah's, however, and in behalf of no less exalted ideals.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It was the   summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn't stop, when the   speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn't stop, when the moral obligation   to explain to one's children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining   in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply   crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides,   people wondered \"Why are we so crazy?\" when men and women alike, upon awakening in   the morning, discovered that during the night, in a state of sleep that transported   them beyond envy or loathing, they had dreamed of the brazenness of Bill Clinton.   I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping   from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING   LIVES HERE. It was the summer when--for the billionth time--the jumble, the mayhem,   the mess proved itself more subtle than this one's ideology and that one's morality.   It was the summer when a president's penis was on everyone's mind, and life, in all   its shameless impurity, once again confounded America.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Sometimes on a Saturday,   Coleman Silk would give me a ring and invite me to drive over from my side of the   mountain after dinner to listen to music, or to play, for a penny a point, a little   gin rummy, or to sit in his living room for a couple of hours and sip some cognac   and help him get through what was always for him the worst night of the week. By   the summer of 1998, he had been alone up here--alone in the large old white clapboard   house where he'd raised four children with his wife, Iris--for close to two years,   ever since Iris suffered a stroke and died overnight while he was in the midst of   battling with the college over a charge of racism brought against him by two students   in one of his classes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Coleman had by then been at Athena almost all his academic   life, an outgoing, sharp-witted, forcefully smooth big-city charmer, something of   a warrior, something of an operator, hardly the prototypical pedantic professor of   Latin and Greek (as witness the Conversational Greek and Latin Club that he started,   heretically, as a young instructor). His venerable survey course in ancient Greek   literature in translation--known as GHM, for Gods, Heroes, and Myth--was popular   with students precisely because of everything direct, frank, and unacademically forceful   in his comportment. \"You know how European literature begins?\" he'd ask, after having   taken the roll at the first class meeting. \"With a quarrel. All of European literature   springs from a fight.\" And then he picked up his copy of \u003ci\u003eThe Iliad\u003c\/i\u003e and read to the   class the opening lines. \"'Divine Muse, sing of the ruinous wrath of Achilles . .   . Begin where they first quarreled, Agamemnon the King of men, and great Achilles.'   And what are they quarreling about, these two violent, mighty souls? It's as basic   as a barroom brawl. They are quarreling over a woman. A girl, really. A girl stolen   from her father. A girl abducted in a war. Mia kouri-that is how she is described   in the poem. Mia, as in modern Greek, is the indefinite article 'a'; kouri, or girl,   evolves in modern Greek into kori, meaning daughter. Now, Agamemnon much prefers   this girl to his wife, Clytemnestra. 'Clytemnestra is not as good as she is,' he   says, 'neither in face nor in figure.' \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat puts directly enough, does it not, why   he doesn't want to give her up? When Achilles demands that Agamemnon return the girl   to her father in order to assuage Apollo, the god who is murderously angry about   the circumstances surrounding her abduction, Agamemnon refuses: he'll agree only   if Achilles gives him \u003ci\u003ehis\u003c\/i\u003e girl in exchange. Thus reigniting Achilles. Adrenal Achilles:   the most highly flammable of explosive wildmen any writer has ever enjoyed portraying;   especially where his prestige and his appetite are concerned, the most hypersensitive   killing machine in the history of warfare. Celebrated Achilles: alienated and estranged   by a slight to his honor. Great heroic Achilles, who, through the strength of his   rage at an insult--the insult of not getting the girl--isolates himself, positions   himself defiantly outside the very society whose glorious protector he is and whose   need of him is enormous. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA quarrel, then, a brutal quarrel over a young girl and   her young body and the delights of sexual rapacity: there, for better or worse, in   this offense against the phallic entitlement, the phallic \u003ci\u003edignity\u003c\/i\u003e, of a powerhouse   of a warrior prince, is how the great imaginative literature of Europe begins, and   that is why, close to three thousand years later, we are going to begin there today.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Coleman was one of a handful of Jews on the Athena faculty when he was hired   and perhaps among the first of the Jews permitted to teach in a classics department   anywhere in America; a few years earlier, Athena's solitary Jew had been E. I. Lonoff,   the all-but-forgotten short story writer whom, back when I was myself a newly published   apprentice in trouble and eagerly seeking the validation of a master, I had once   paid a memorable visit to here. Through the eighties and into the nineties, Coleman   was also the first and only Jew ever to serve at Athena as dean of faculty; then,   in 1995, after retiring as dean in order to round out his career back in the classroom,   he resumed teaching two of his courses under the aegis of the combined languages   and literature program that had absorbed the Classics Department and that was run   by Professor Delphine Roux. As dean, and with the full support of an ambitious new   president, Coleman had taken an antiquated, backwater, Sleepy Hollowish college and,   not without steamrolling, put an end to the place as a gentlemen's farm by aggressively   encouraging the deadwood among the faculty's old guard to seek early retirement,   recruiting ambitious young assistant professors, and revolutionizing the curriculum.   It's almost a certainty that had he retired, without incident, in his own good time,   there would have been the festschrift, there would have been the institution of the   Coleman Silk Lecture Series, there would have been a classical studies chair established   in his name, and perhaps--given his importance to the twentieth-century revitalization   of the place--the humanities building or even North Hall, the college's landmark,   would have been renamed in his honor after his death. In the small academic world   where he had lived the bulk of his life, he would have long ceased to be resented   or controversial or even feared, and, instead, officially glorified forever. | Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral Winner: PEN\/Faulkner Award","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302662066405,"sku":"NP9780375726347","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375726347.jpg?v=1767739863","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/the-human-stain-isbn-9780375726347","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}