Two New Philip Roth Novels

The New York Times reports: Fifty years after Neil Klugman first held Brenda Patimkin’s glasses in Philip Roth’s first book, “Goodbye, Columbus,” Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has announced that it will release Mr. Roth’s 30th and 31st books, the publisher said in an e-mail message. “The Humbling,” which is scheduled for the fall, is a novel about an aging stage actor whose empty life is altered by “a counterplot of unusual erotic desire,” the publisher said. The company (which awarded its Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship to “Goodbye, Columbus” in 1959) will also release “Nemesis,” a work of fiction by Mr. Roth, above. Set in the summer of 1944, it tells of a polio epidemic and its effects on a closely knit Newark community and its children. That book is scheduled for publication in 2010.