(Fiction, 304 pp. 2010)
Bucky Cantor is working as a vigorous young playground director when a polio outbreak mysteriously begins to ravage 1944 Newark. Faced with an opportunity to leave the city and take a job in a Catskills summer camp, Bucky is torn between personal safety and professional duty in this modern American morality tale.
- One Book/One Paltz reading guide with questions
- Review: Kirkus
- Review by Edward Docx, Observer, October 2, 2010
- Review by Leah Hagar Cohen, New York Times, October 8, 2010
- Review by Nicholas Lezard, Guardian, Sept. 27, 2011
- Additional reviews
- Philip Roth’s Epidemic and Ours by Samuel Freedman, Washington Post, June 26, 2020
- The Eerie Familiarities of Philip Roth’s Novel of a Polio Epidemic by Richard Brody, The New Yorker, April 3, 2020
- Essay by Igor Webb, “Four Questions About Nemesis Answered,” Forward, May 25, 2011
- Philip Roth’s Nemesis: The Case Against God and Man, by Robert Loss, PopMatters, October 11, 2010
- Philip Roth reading from Nemesis (video: 10 min.)
- Nemesis and the COVID-19 Pandemic, Newark Public Library, June 26, 2020 (video: 57 min.)
- Lucia Guimaraes interviews Philip Roth (video: 3 min.)
