The Prague Orgy

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$14.00 US
Knopf | Vintage
24 per carton
On sale Jan 30, 1996 | 978-0-679-74903-5
Sales rights: US, Canada, Open Mkt
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In quest of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, the American novelist Nathan Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s.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.
"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

About

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In quest of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, the American novelist Nathan Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s.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.

Praise

"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