Two New Philip Roth Novels Coming
By Dave Itzkoff weriting in the New York Times February 25.

Author pic left by Nancy Crampton

Two new novels by Philip Roth, called “The Humbling” and “Nemesis,” will be published in 2009 and 2010, respectively.

Fifty years after Neil Klugman first held Brenda Patimkin’s glasses in Philip Roth’s first book, “Goodbye, Columbus,” Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has announced that it will release Mr. Roth’s 30th and 31st books, the publisher said in an e-mail message.

“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 set in the summer of 1944 that 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.

BONUS: The New York Times’s 1959 review of “Goodbye, Columbus” can be found here.