From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral--"a thoughtful...elegant"--The New York Times Book Review and often hilarous novel about the dilemma of pleasure: where we seek it; why we flee it; and how we struggle to make a truce between dignity and desire.

As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself "a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes." Little does he realize how prophetic this motto will be--or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a m?nage ? trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a novel that "ranks among the major achievements in the literature of our time"--Village Voice.