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The Anatomy Lesson
  • Published: 6 October 2016
  • ISBN: 9780099476610
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $39.99

The Anatomy Lesson

Formats & editions
Paperback
6 Oct 2016
EBook
30 June 2011
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Philip Roth's entire oeuvre – 31 books – to be reissued in electric new Vintage jackets for October 2016

'The Anatomy Lesson is a ferocious, heartfelt book - lavish with laughs and flamboyant inventions' John Updike

With his fortieth birthday receding into the distance, along with his hairline and his most successful novel, 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, finds himself physically unable to write a line.

He treks from one doctor to another, but none can find a cause for the pain and nobody can assuage it. Could it be, he wonders to himself, that the cause of the pain is nothing less than the books he has written?

As he grapples with this possibility, he tries an onslaught of painkillers, then vodka, and finally marijuana. He contemplates threatening the pain with suicide, attempting to scare it out of his system. He toys with the prospect of a dramatic career change. What will it take for the pain to finally leave him alone?
  • Published: 6 October 2016
  • ISBN: 9780099476610
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 304
  • RRP: $39.99

About the author

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.
portrait photo of Philip Roth

Also by Philip Roth

The Humbling
Nemesis
Indignation
Exit Ghost
The Facts
When She Was Good
Letting Go
See all

Praise for The Anatomy Lesson

‘Scorchingly funny, gravely disconcerting’

Harold Pinter

‘Breathtaking stuff, fiction of grit and energy and pizazz’

Washington Post

‘Roth has a genius for the comedy of entrapment...he writers America’s most raucously funny novels’

The Times

‘Opening the first page of any Philip Roth is like hearing the ignition of a boiler roar into life’

Guardian

‘This is a beautifully worked and comic novel by a writer at the height of his powers’

Sunday Telegraph

'One of the most intelligent and energetic of American writers’

New Yorker

‘The finest, boldest and funniest piece of fiction which Philip Roth has yet produced’

The Spectator

‘One of Roth's most unsparing and revealing books—forceful and startling’

Newsday

‘The Anatomy Lesson is a ferocious, heartfelt book – lavish with laughs and flamboyant inventions’

John Updike

Roth has a genius for the comedy of entrapment...He writes America's most raucously funny novels

The Time

This is a beautifully worked and comic novel by a writer at the height of his powers

Sunday Telegraph

One of the most intelligent and energetic of American writers

New Yorker

Scorchingly funny, gravely disconcerting

Harold Pinter

The finest, boldest and funniest piece of fiction which Philip Roth has yet produced

Spectator

One of Roth's most unsparing and revealing books - forceful and startling

Newsday

The Anatomy Lesson is breathtaking stuff, fiction of grit and energy and pizazz

Washington Post

Opening the first page of any Philip Roth is like hearing the ignition on a boiler roar into life

Guardian