[]
The Prague Orgy
  • Published: 1 December 1995
  • ISBN: 9780099476511
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $28.00

The Prague Orgy

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Dec 1995
EBook
8 June 2011
Buy from…
Book Hero BookHub Fishpond Mighty Ape Paper Plus The Nile The Warehouse Whitcoulls Unity Books University Book Shop Find Local Retailers

Philip Roth's entire oeuvre – 31 books – to be reissued in electric new Vintage jackets for October 2016

In search of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, American novelist Nathan Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s.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 an institutionalised oppression that is rather different from his own. He also discovers, among the subjugated writers with whom he quickly becomes embroiled in a series of bizarre and poignant adventures, an appealingly perverse kind of heroism.

The Prague Orgy, consisting of entries from Zuckerman's notebooks recording his sojourn among these outcast artists, 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.
  • Published: 1 December 1995
  • ISBN: 9780099476511
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 96
  • RRP: $28.00

About the author

Philip Roth

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933, to second-generation Americans Bess and Herman. He grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood his writing returned to time and again. Roth received the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), but it was his fourth, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) which secured his reputation as one of America’s finest writers, and American Pastoral (1997) which won the Pulitzer Prize. Roth wrote thirty-one books in all, winning the International Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. He was presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively. Roth died aged eighty-five on 22 May 2018, six years after retiring from writing.
portrait photo of Philip Roth

Also by Philip Roth

The Plot Against America
Nemesis
Exit Ghost
I Married a Communist
The Dying Animal
The Humbling
Indignation
See all

Praise for The Prague Orgy

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, 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

The Times

Scabrous, gutsy and scathing

The Times

A black fable about the lies and fictions which are the life blood of both politics and literature

Sunday Times