Book description
In quest of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer,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
institutionalised 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, 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.
In 1997, 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, previously awarded to
John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He
has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics
Circle Award. He has 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."
Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006
the PEN/Nabokov Award 'for a body of work...of enduring originality
and consummate craftmanship' and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for
achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose 'scale of
achievement over a sustained career...places him or her in the highest
rank of American literature.'
Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published
in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The
last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.
