Sabbath’s Theater: A Novel

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)