Operation Shylock: A Confession

What if a look-alike stranger stole your name, usurped your biography, and went about the world pretending to be you? In this fiendishly imaginative book (which may or may not be fiction), Philip Roth meets a man who may or may not be Philip Roth. Because someone with that name has been touring Israel, promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews. 

With excruciating suspense, unfettered philosophical speculation, and a cast of characters that includes Israeli intelligence agents, Palestinian exiles, an accused war criminal, and an enticing charter member of an organization called Anti-Semites Anonymous, Operation Shylock barrels across the frontier between fact and fiction, seriousness and high comedy, history and nightmare. Master novelist Philip Roth confronts his double, - the "fake" Philip Roth becomes a monstrous nemesis to the "real" Philip Roth, who must take a frightening and mysterious journey through the volatile Middle East. Suspenseful, hilarious, and impassioned, Operation Shylock is at once a spy story, a political thriller, and a confession, pulsing with intelligence and intense narrative energy.

"...rarely have fact and fiction, personal confession and wild imaginings led such a deeply, unnervingly comic dance."  -  Kirkus Reviews

Philip Milton Roth gained early literary fame with the 1959 collection Goodbye, Columbus (winner of 1960's National Book Award), cemented it with his 1969 bestseller Portnoy's Complaint and has continued to write critically-acclaimed works, many of which feature his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. The Zuckerman novels began with The Ghost Writer in 1979, and include American Pastoral (1997) (winner of the Pulitzer Prize). In May 2011, he won the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in fiction.