The Prague Orgy

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In quest of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, the American novelist Nathan Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s.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