The Prague Orgy
A Novel
Philip Roth
The Prague Orgy offers a peek into the iconic Nathan Zuckerman's notebook as he travels communist Prague, seeking the lost manuscripts of a Yiddish martyr.
In the 1970s, the gifted writer Nathan Zuckerman journeys to Czechoslovakia in search of unpublished stories of a late Yiddish writer. Zuckerman has been knocked about by the literary establishment in the states and disparaged by critics and fans alike, but he finds that the authors in Soviet-occupied Prague face even worse treatment.
As he becomes enmeshed with writers facing institutional oppression, censorship, and surveillance, and with increasing pressure to leave the country or else, Zuckerman develops a new perspective on totalitarianism and, perhaps, a warped sense of pleasure in his place among the persecuted.
"Obscenely outrageous and yet brilliantly reflective of a paranoid reality that has become universal. It is the best of Roth." —The New York Times Book Review
“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.” —The New York Times Book Review
"A black fable about the lies and fictions which are the life blood of both politics and literature." —Sunday Times (London)
About the Author
Philip Roth (1933–2018) was one of the most prolific and provocative American novelists of the twentieth century. Born in Newark, New Jersey, the city that anchors much of his fiction, he made his debut with Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award in 1960. He went on to publish more than thirty books, among them Portnoy's Complaint, The Ghost Writer, American Pastoral, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. His recurring alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman and David Kepesh, allowed him to probe Jewish American identity, desire, mortality, and the pressures of history with relentless candor. Roth received the National Jewish Book Award three times, the National Book Award twice, the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the Man Booker International Prize, and the National Medal of Arts. He retired from writing in 2012 and died in New York in 2018.