The Prague Orgy: A Novel

“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

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In the 1970s, the gifted writer Nathan Zuckerman journeys to Czechoslovakia in search of unpublished stories of a late Yiddish writer.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.

“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)