The Breast

By Philip Roth

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Philip Roth's 1972 novella in the tradition of Kafka and Gogol, narrated by David Kepesh, a professor of comparative literature. One morning Kepesh finds that he has turned into a 155-pound female breast. Confined to a hospital bed and attended by doctors, his lover and his father, he tries to understand what has happened to him and whether he is still himself.

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• Barack Obama: “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, they are steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up — what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up.”