Mercy of a Rude Stream marks the astonishing return of Henry Roth, sixty years after the publication of his classic novel Call it Sleep. A book of time, memory, and desire, this new novel is set in the New York of World War I: a colorful vibrant, carelessly brutal city where an immigrant boy, Ira Stigmanm is coming of age. Like Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, Ira begins to discover the genius and the burden of his imagination, as he takes his first tentative steps toward adulthood.

A contempoary of the great modernist writers, Roth is being rediscovered by a new generation of readers.