A Diving Rock on The Hudson - Mercy Of A Rude Stream Volume 2 - 'A masterpiece, not remotely like anything else in American literature'

'A landmark of the American literary century' Boston Globe Sixty years after the publication of his great modernist masterpiece, Call It Sleep, Henry Roth returned with Mercy of a Rude Stream - a sequence of four internationally-acclaimed epic novels of immigrant life in early-twentieth century New York. The second novel in the internationally acclaimed six-volume sequence which began with MERCY OF A RUDE STREAM.
Ira Stigman, now an adolescent in 1920s New York, is on the rack. All his friends seem to be paragons of achievement and sophistication, while his own life bears the taint of an impoverished immigrant background. Work on the trolleycars and selling soda at Yankee Stadium introduces him to an underworld of corruption and petty thieving, and all his choices seem to be the wrong ones. Worst of all, within his own family exists a temptation so dark that it has corroded Ira's very soul.
A DIVING ROCK ON THE HUDSON is fearless in its depiction of a young man in the lower depths, yet in its glimpses of redemption it offers hope with the power of literature as a force for comprehension and forgiveness.'The literary comeback of the century' Vanity Fair 'As unquenchably vibrant with life as the immigrants whose existence it commemorates' Sunday Times 'A dynamic and moving event .