A Diving Rock on The Hudson

The second novel in the internationally acclaimed six-volume sequence which began with MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM Ira Stigman,now an adolescent in 1920's New York,is on the rack.All his friends seem to be paragons of achievement and sophistication,while his own life bears the taint of an impoverished immigrant background.Work on the trolleycars and selling soda at Yankee Stadium introduces him to an underworld of corruption and petty thieving,and all his choices seem to be the wrong ones.Worst of all,within his own family exists a temptation so dark that it has corroded Ira's very soul..A DIVING ROCK ON THE HUDSONis fearless in its depiction of a young man in the lower depths,yet in its glimpses of redemption it offers hope with the power of lterature as a force for comprehension and forgiveness.

“The Ur-novel at the heart of American literature - Mercy of a Rude Stream is a towering achievement”

The Ur-novel at the heart of American literature - Mercy of a Rude Stream is a towering achievement -- Junot Diaz
Henry Roth has only two peers in American-English Jewish fiction, Nathanael West and Philip Roth -- Harold Bloom
The literary comeback of the century Vanity Fair
A masterpiece ... It is not remotely like anything else in American literature.... It is this pitiless examination of a writer grappling with his demons, at the highest reaches of his intellectual capacity, that gives Mercy of a Rude Stream its ferocious passion.... It is the exhilaration felt by a man who has cast off six decades of self-repression and finally feels himself free The New York Review of Books
Roth creates his own Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man--a marvelously poetic chronicle Chicago Sun-Times
Mr. Roth's innovative use of language is both beautiful and highly realistic ... Although there is no style called Rothian, there should be New York Times Book Review
This novel is as unquenchably vibrant with life as the immigrants whose existence it commemorates Sunday Times
A genuine publishing event ... unbeatable in [its] drama, tension and feeling Literary Review

In 1994 Henry Roth broke his sixty-year literary silence following his classic novel CALL IT SLEEP, with the publication of volume one of MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM, called A STAR SHINES OVER MT. MORRIS PARK. This four-volume series was hailed as 'unsurpassable' in the annals of twentieth-century American literature. Henry Roth died aged 89 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in October 1995.

The second novel in the internationally acclaimed six-volume sequence which began with MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM Ira Stigman,now an adolescent in 1920's New York,is on the rack.All his friends seem to be paragons of achievement and sophistication,while his own life bears the taint of an impoverished immigrant background.Work on the trolleycars and selling soda at Yankee Stadium introduces him to an underworld of corruption and petty thieving,and all his choices seem to be the wrong ones.Worst of all,within his own family exists a temptation so dark that it has corroded Ira's very soul..A DIVING ROCK ON THE HUDSONis fearless in its depiction of a young man in the lower depths,yet in its glimpses of redemption it offers hope with the power of lterature as a force for comprehension and forgiveness.

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