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Book Cover for: Sabbath's Theater: National Book Award Winner, Philip Roth

Sabbath's Theater: National Book Award Winner

Philip Roth

Reader Score

82%

82% of readers

recommend this book

Winner:National Book Award -Fiction (1995)
As much as he wants to be the Marquis de Sade, he is not. As much as he wants to be seventeen, he is not. As much as he wants to be dead, he is not. He is Mickey Sabbath, the aging, raging powerhouse whose savage effrontery and mocking audacity are at the heart of Philip Roth's new novel. Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his long-time mistress - an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring exceeds even his own - Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Vintage
  • Publish Date: Aug 6th, 1996
  • Pages: 464
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.14in - 5.12in - 0.99in - 0.78lb
  • EAN: 9780679772590
  • Categories: LiteraryPsychologicalBiographical

About the Author

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. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He 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." Roth received PEN's two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018.

Praise for this book

ONE OF THE NEW YORKER'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

"A great work ... Roth's richest, most rewarding novel ... funny and profound ... as powerful as writing can be." --The 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." --Frank Kermode, The 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." --James Wood, New Republic