A "balefully powerful" (New York Times) fiction-within-a-fiction centering on the fraught marriage between a young writer and his muse-turned-nemesis from Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth.

Peter Tarnopol is a gifted, emerging writer, and his wife Maureen longs to be the subject of his work. Their relationship is tumultuous--based on fraud and powered by moral blackmail. And yet, the the couple's union is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen's death, Peter is still trying - and failing - to write his way free of it. Out of desperate inventions and scorching truths, acts of weakness and shocking cruelty, Philip Roth creates a fierce tragedy about a fatal impasse between a man and a woman.