Description:

At forty, 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, is unable to write a line. Now his work is trekking from one doctor to another, but none can find a cause for the pain and nobody can assuage it. Zuckerman himself wonders if the pain can have been caused by his own books. And while he is wondering, his dependence on painkillers extends to an addiction to vodka and marijuana. The third volume of the trilogy and epilogue *Zuckerman Bound, The Anatomy Lesson* is a great comedy of illness and provides some of the funniest scenes in all of Roth's fiction as well as some of the fiercest. ### Review "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 "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 ### About the Author In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians' Prize for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004." Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award 'for a body of work...of enduring originality and consummate craftmanship' and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose 'scale of achievement over a sustained career...places him or her in the highest rank of American literature.' Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.