The Prague Orgy

by Philip Roth

Overview

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral—“a lithe comic masterpiece” (Newsweek) consisting of notebook entries from one of his best-loved characters, Nathan Zuckerman.

In quest of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, the American novelist Nathan Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s. There, in a nation straightjacketed by totalitarian Communism, he discovers a literary predicament, marked by institutionalized oppression, that is rather different from his own. He also discovers, among the oppressed writers with whom he quickly becomes embroiled in a series of bizarre and poignant adventures, an appealingly perverse kind of heroism.

The Prague Orgy completes the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman bound. It provides a startling ending to Roth's intricately designed magnum opus on the unforeseen consequences of art.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780679749035
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/30/1996
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	96
Sales rank:	509,042
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.99(h) x 0.23(d)

About the Author

PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.” Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018.

Hometown:

Connecticut

Date of Birth:

March 19, 1933

Place of Birth:

Newark, New Jersey

Education:

B.A. in English, Bucknell University, 1954; M.A. in English, University of Chicago, 1955

Editorial Reviews

"One of Roth's most brilliant (and funniest) works ... a lithe comic masterpiece." —Newsweek

"Obscenely outrageous and yet brilliantly reflective of a paranoid reality that has become universal. It is the best of Roth, a kind of coda to all his fiction so far." —Harold Bloom, The New York Times Book Review

"This fitting capstone to Roth's Zuckerman trilogy proves that no one now writing can be funnier and more passionately serious than Philip Roth." —Time

From the Publisher

One of Roth’s most brilliant (and funniest) works…A lithe comic masterpiece.”

Newsweek

This fitting capstone to Roth’s Zuckerman trilogy proves that no one now writing can be funnier and more passionately serious than Philip Roth.”

Time

Obscenely outrageous and yet brilliantly reflective of a paranoid reality that has become universal. It is the best of Roth, a kind of coda to all his fiction so far.”

New York Times Book Review