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 *
Scorchingly funny, gravely disconcerting * Harold Pinter *

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). His fourth novel, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), secured his reputation as one of America’s finest writers, and American Pastoral (1997) 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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