Sabbath's Theater
A Novel
Philip Roth
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Philip Roth at the peak of his powers, Sabbath's Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath an aging, raging powerhouse of a gargantuan hero. At sixty-four Mickey Sabbath is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous.
Sabbath's Theater tells Mickey's story in the wake of the death of his mistress, an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring exceeds even his own. Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Mickey is now besieged by ghosts—of his mother, his beloved brother, his vanished first wife, his mistress of thirteen years.
Bereft and grieving, he embarks on a turbulent journey back into his past, one that brings him to the brink of madness and extinction. But no matter how ardently he courts death, he is too exuberantly alive to succeed at dying.
“A great work … Roth’s richest, most rewarding novel … funny and profound … as powerful as writing can be." —New York Times Book Review
“This splendidly wicked book … is among the most remarkable novels in recent years…. The energy of the book is amazing…. Roth is hilariously serious about life and death.” —New York Review of Books
"Roth’s extraordinary new novel is an astonishment and a scourge, and one of the strangest achievements of fictional prose that I have ever read…. It is very exquisite.” —New Republic
"A work of near heroic vitality and cunning." —Sunday Telegraph
“For me, the book of the year—maybe the decade-is Sabbath’s Theater…funny…moving, imaginative, deep…A masterpiece.” —Times Literary Supplement (London)
About the Author
Philip Roth (1933–2018) was one of the most prolific and provocative American novelists of the twentieth century. Born in Newark, New Jersey, the city that anchors much of his fiction, he made his debut with Goodbye, Columbus, which won the National Book Award in 1960. He went on to publish more than thirty books, among them Portnoy's Complaint, The Ghost Writer, American Pastoral, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. His recurring alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman and David Kepesh, allowed him to probe Jewish American identity, desire, mortality, and the pressures of history with relentless candor. Roth received the National Jewish Book Award three times, the National Book Award twice, the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the Man Booker International Prize, and the National Medal of Arts. He retired from writing in 2012 and died in New York in 2018.