This list originally ran on September 24, 2007. It is being republished on the occasion of Philip Roth’s death, and does not include those books that have been released since that date.

The indispensable, the significant, the disposable, and everything in between.

Classic

Portnoy’s Complaint, Random House (1969) $14 $17 now 18% off $14 ﻿Roth finds his voice (or his first great one) through one of postwar lit’s most memorable protagonists. In a long therapy session, “the Raskolnikov of jerking off” unloads all the neuroses and fixations of the hyperarticulate Jew, who seems a stock character today only because Portnoy was such a seminal one. $14 at Amazon Buy $14 at Amazon Buy

Sabbath’s Theater, Houghton Mifflin (1995) $13 $17 now 24% off $13 ﻿Brilliant, smutty, and marvelously nuts, this is the story of an unemployed, priapic puppeteer grieving the loss of his nymphomaniacal, adulterous soulmate Drenka. Notorious for a scene of graveside masturbation (take that, liver!), the book pushes Roth’s obsession with sex and death to its limits. It’s also hilarious. $13 at Amazon Buy $13 at Amazon Buy

Essential

﻿Zuckerman Bound, FSG (1979–1985) $26 $35 now 26% off $26 ﻿The birth of randy, combative, brilliant Nathan Zuckerman, the vehicle for Roth’s career-long thought experiment about the existential drama of his own career. This quartet (now available in a Library of America edition) takes us halfway through the life cycle of Roth’s success, from the 23-year-old apprentice visiting his reclusive hero (The Ghost Writer) to the mid-thirties celebrity wrestling with his fame (Zuckerman Unbound) to the fortysomething superstar scouring Czechoslovakia for literary talent (The Prague Orgy). Martin Amis has called it, not necessarily negatively, “perhaps the most cramped and stubborn exercise in self-examination known to modern letters.” Runs the gamut of self-absorption, from brilliantly taut to tedious. $26 at Amazon Buy $26 at Amazon Buy

Solid Read

The Professor of Desire, FSG (1977) $14 $16 now 13% off $14 David Kepesh, five years after his first appearance, in The Breast, is followed from his Borscht Belt childhood into his thirties, by which time his over-the-top sex life is settling into something slightly more mundane. Just about the closest Roth has ever come to writing a happy ending. $14 at Amazon Buy $14 at Amazon Buy

The Counterlife, FSG (1987) $14 $17 now 18% off $14 By rights, this shouldn’t hold together. There are plot reversals within plot reversals, after which you can’t remember which Zuckerman is dead and which is alive, or which Zuckerman had the anal sex by which he was deemed to have married his exotic bride. But for all the potential confusion, it’s satisfying Roth. $14 at Amazon Buy $14 at Amazon Buy

For Fans Only

Letting Go, Random House (1962) $7 $17 now 59% off $7 This huge first novel contains a lot of what we now recognize as “Philip Roth”: detached Jewish protagonist, marriages ranging from uneasy to horrid, illicit sex (at least by the standards of the day—the book’s set in the fifties). But the voice is curiously neutral, lacking much of the whipped-up frenzy of later Roth. $7 at Amazon Buy $7 at Amazon Buy

Avoid