Shifting Landscapes

This book collects all of Henry Roth’s 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 Roth’s 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 Roth’s 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 Roth’s novels, Shifting Landscape is essential reader – for within its melodic stories we gain insight into the reasons for Roth’s legendary sixty-year writer’s block and discern the first intimations of the literary renaissance that has become Roth’s in the 1990’s.