The Breast
A Novel
Description
“Terrific…inventive and sane and very funny. The trick which is the heart of the book is brilliant…and rich with meaning.” — New York Times Book Review
“Hilarious, serious, visionary, logical, sexual-philosophical; the ending amazes.” —Cynthia Ozick
In Philip Roth's brilliant take on The Metamorphosis, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed—into a 155-pound breast.
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 full implications of Kepesh’s metamorphosis—a daring heretical book that brings us face to face with the intrinsic strangeness of sex and subjectivity.
Pages96
Released2026
LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperCollins
ISBN9780063508408
SellerHarperCollins
About the author(s)
PHILIP ROTH (1933–2018) won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians' Prize for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004" and the W.H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year, making Roth the first writer in the forty-six-year history of the prize to win it twice.
In 2005 Roth became the third living American writer to have his works published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. In 2012 he won Spain's highest honor, the Prince of Asturias Award, and in 2013 he received France's highest honor, Commander of the Legion of Honor.
