The Anatomy Lesson

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'Scorchingly funny, gravely disconcerting' - Harold Pinter

Pulitzer Prize-winner Philip Roth's remarkable successor to The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Bound, in which the iconic protagonist reaches a crisis.

Nathan Zuckerman is past forty, past the high point of his success, but by no means past pain. When the man for whom work was life is struck by a mysterious pure pain, which begins in his neck and shoulders, invades his torso and possesses his spirit, he finds himself physically unable to write a line.

Doctor after doctor fails to uncover the cause and to assuage the symptoms, and Zuckerman begins to wonder if his own books might be the culprit. He tries piles of painkillers, then vodka, then marijuana. He contemplates scaring the pain out of his system with the threat of suicide. He toys with a dramatic career change. What will it take for the pain to finally leave him alone?

‘Scorchingly funny, gravely disconcerting’
Harold Pinter

About Philip Roth

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933, to second-generation Americans Bess and Herman. He grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood his writing returned to time and again.

Roth received the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), but it was his fourth, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) which secured his reputation as one of America’s finest writers, and American Pastoral (1997) which won the Pulitzer Prize. Roth wrote thirty-one books in all, winning the International Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. He was presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively.

Roth died aged eighty-five on 22 May 2018, six years after retiring from writing.

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