Book description
At forty, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious
affliction - pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading
his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman, whose work
was his life, is unable to write a line. Now his work is trekking from
one doctor to another, but none can find a cause for the pain and
nobody can assuage it. Zuckerman himself wonders if the pain can have
been caused by his own books. And while he is wondering, his
dependence on painkillers extends to an addiction to vodka and marijuana.
The third volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The
Anatomy Lesson is a great comedy of illness and provides some of
the funniest scenes in all of Roth's fiction as well as some of the fiercest.
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.
