The Breast

Like a latter-day Gregor Samsa, Professor David Kepesh wakes up one morning to find that he has been transformed. But where Kafka’s protagonist turned into a giant beetle, the narrator of Philip Roth’s richly conceived fantasy has become a 155-pound female breast. What follows is a deliriously funny yet touching exploration of the full implications of Kepesh’s metamorphosis—a daring, heretical book that brings us face to face with the intrinsic strangeness of sex and subjectivity. “The Breast is terrific . . . inventive and sane and very funny. The trick which is the heart of the book is brilliant . . . and rich with meaning.”—John Gardner, The New York Times Book Review “Hilarious, serious, visionary, logical, sexual-philosophical; the ending amazes—the joke takes three steps beyond savagery and satire and turns into a sublimeness of pity. One knows when one is reading something that will permanently enter the culture.”—Cynthia Ozick