The Prague Orgy

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In the 1970s, the gifted writer Nathan Zuckerman journeys to Czechoslovakia in search of unpublished stories of a late Yiddish writer.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