Bookloft hosts unique Webcast with Philip Roth

GREAT BARRINGTON — The Bookloft will be hosting a live Webcast interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Philip Roth at the Great Barrington store at 8 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 16, featuring his new novel "Indignation" (Houghton Mifflin).

The Bookloft is only one of 60 select bookstores across the United States who will be hosting this live "'Indignation' Day Webcast" with Roth. The Webcast will feature an interview with the author and a discussion about his latest novel. A limited amount of signed copies of "Indignation" will be available for purchase that evening.

"Indignation," Roth's 29th book, is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage, and error.

It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, N.J., Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy.

As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father's fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger

in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the Midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world.

Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for "American Pastoral" in 1997. In 1998, he received the National Medal of Arts and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times.

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." Recently, Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: In 2006, the PEN/Nabokov Award, and in 2007, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.

All are invited to attend the event. The Bookloft is located in the Barrington Plaza on Route 7 in Great Barrington. Information: (413) 528-1521.