 First edition cover | |
| Author | Philip Roth |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | Zuckerman Trilogy |
| Published | 1983 Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 291 |
| ISBN | 9780374104924 |
| OCLC | 9643529 |
| Preceded by | Zuckerman Unbound |
The Anatomy Lesson is a 1983 novel by American author Philip Roth. It is the third novel from Roth to feature Nathan Zuckerman as the main character.
Having buried his father in the previous novel Zuckerman Unbound , Zuckerman finds himself facing middle age and an undiagnosable pain. The mysterious ailment has him laid up and keeps him from his regime of writing. Barred by pain from writing and bored by inactivity, Zuckerman's mind is free to wander anxiously over the memories of his failed marriages and relationships with family members. In a desperate burst of nostalgia and ambition, Zuckerman resolves to return to the University of Chicago, his alma mater, in order to pursue medical school.
The Anatomy Lesson is the least well-received of the Zuckerman trilogy Zuckerman Bound , though the book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the National Book Award. In The Observer in 1984, Martin Amis wrote, "'The Anatomy Lesson' may be the third and final installment of the Zuckerman trilogy, but it is also Roth's second consecutive novel about what success is like. Such fixity!... He has now written two autobiographical novels about the consequences of writing autobiographical novels," adding, "no modern writer, perhaps no writer, has taken self-examination so far and so literally." [1] In The New Yorker , John Updike was more complimentary [2] finding, "The postmodernist writer's bind is expressed in flat authoritative accents reminiscent of Hemingway...Throughout, a beautiful passion to be honest propels the grinding, whining paragraphs. Yet, though lavish with laughs and flamboyant invention, The Anatomy Lesson seemed to this Roth fan the least successful of the Zuckerman trio, the least objectified and coherent."
The first and second books in the Zuckerman trilogy are 1979's The Ghost Writer and 1981's Zuckerman Unbound . The three were collected and republished in 1985 as Zuckerman Bound . Republication moved some critics to reassess this third entry; again in The New Yorker, [3] John Updike wrote, "In toto, Zuckerman Bound shows the author's always ebullient invention and artful prose at their most polished and concentrated, the topic of authorship clearly being, to this author, a noble one." In The New York Times Book Review , [4] critic Harold Bloom said of the three collected Zuckerman novels, "Zuckerman Bound merits something reasonably close to the highest level of esthetic praise for tragicomedy."
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
The Human Stain is a novel by Philip Roth, published May 5, 2000. The book is set in Western Massachusetts in the late 1990s. It is narrated by 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in several earlier Roth novels, and who also figures in both American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), two books that form a loose trilogy with The Human Stain. Zuckerman acts largely as an observer as the complex story of the protagonist, Coleman Silk, a retired professor of classics, is slowly revealed.
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short story writer.
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Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-three novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail", her "rigorous and artful style", and her "astute and open language."
Zuckerman Bound is a trilogy of novels by Philip Roth, originally published in 1985.
The Ghost Writer is a 1979 novel by the American author Philip Roth. It is the first of Roth's novels narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, one of the author's putative fictional alter egos, and constitutes the first book in his Zuckerman Bound trilogy. The novel touches on themes common to many Roth works, including identity, the responsibilities of authors to their subjects, and the condition of Jews in America. Parts of the novel are a reprise of The Diary of Anne Frank.
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Zuckerman Unbound is a 1981 novel by the American author Philip Roth.
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The Same Door is the first collection of John Updike's short stories in book form. It was published in 1959 by Alfred A. Knopf. This was the year after his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was published by the same company, a house he was to remain with for 50 years.
This is a bibliography of works by and about Philip Roth.
The following is the complete bibliography of John Updike, an American novelist, poet, critic and essayist noted for his prolific output over a 50-year period. His bibliography includes some 23 novels, 18 short story collections, 12 collections of poetry, 4 children's books, and 12 collections of non-fiction.
Harold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was described as "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." Following the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. During his lifetime, he edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. Bloom was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Book of Numbers, published in 2015, is a metafiction novel written by author Joshua Cohen. The novel is about a writer named Joshua Cohen who is contracted to ghostwrite the autobiography of a tech billionaire called Joshua Cohen. It was published by Random House, and released in 2015.
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