Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to Publish Two More Philip Roth Books

Posted on February 25, 2009

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced that it will publish two upcoming books by Philip Roth. The New York Times reports that the novels will include The Humbling and Nemesis.

The Humbling, which is scheduled for the fall, is a novel about an aging stage actor whose empty life is altered by "a counterplot of unusual erotic desire," the publisher said. The company (which awarded its Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship to Goodbye, Columbus in 1959) will also release Nemesis, a work of fiction by Mr. Roth, above. Set in the summer of 1944, it tells of a polio epidemic and its effects on a closely knit Newark community and its children. That book is scheduled for publication in 2010.

These will be Roth's 30th and 31st books.

Nemesis sounds very frightening. Polio must have been absolutely terrifying for children - and their parents - in the 1940s.

Update: Roth tells NPR, "In a way I was imagining a menace we never encountered in all its force. I wanted to imagine what it would have been like, in our neighborhood, had the menace [of polio] struck."