Shifting Landscapes

This book collects all of Henry Roths published writings, other than Call it Sleep, Mercy of a Rude Stream and A Diving Rock on the Hudson, into one major body of work, spanning a period that beings in 1925 and ends in 1987. The thirty-one pieces include all of Roths short stories, the only remaining chapter of the unfinished second novel that he wrote for Maxwell Perkins (and later burned), and other articles and memoir materials.

Edited with and introduction by Mario Materassi, the distinguished Italian translator and Roths longtime friend, the book contains writings that have appeared in such well-known publications as the Atlantic, Commentary and The New Yorker, as well as in small magazines and periodicals long since defunct. For any reader who has been held spellbound by the sheer lyrical power and psychological brilliance of Roths novels, Shifting Landscape is essential reader - for within its melodic stories we gain insight into the reasons for Roths legendary sixty-year writers block and discern the first intimations of the literary renaissance that has become Roths in the 1990s.