Sabbath's Theater
ByPublisher Description
He is relentlessly defiant. He is exceedingly libidinous. His appetite for the outrageous is insatiable. He is Mickey Sabbath, the aging, raging powerhouse whose savage effrontery and mocking audacity are at the heart of Philip Roth's astonishing new novel. 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 in his mid-sixties and 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. Sabbath's Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is its gargantuan hero. This book, which presents Philip Roth at the peak of his powers, is sur
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesSabbath's Theater Reviews
“Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater is a masterfully written story of a man whose life is domineered by sexual exploitations and making everyone around him uncomfortable. Mickey Sabbath is one of the greatest reprobates I’ve read in literature. He’s crude, self-destructive, hilarious, and strangely compelling. This is a filthy pig pen of a story, and readers get to watch Sabbath hilariously roll around in that filth as he slips into madness.
What makes the novel remarkable(read the book, you’ll appreciate that adjective) is Roth’s ability to transform a character who should be completely repulsive into someone impossible to look away from. Beneath the vulgarity and excess lies a meditation on grief, aging, loneliness, and mortality. Sabbath’s outrageous behavior is often laugh-out-loud funny, but it also masks a deep despair that gives the novel surprising emotional weight. It is offensive, brilliant, exhausting, and unforgettable. It is a chaotic masterpiece from one of greatest novelists I’ve read so far.”About Philip Roth
PHILIP ROTH (1933–2018) won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. 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, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. 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" and the W.H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year, making Roth the first writer in the forty-six-year history of the prize to win it twice.
In 2005 Roth became the third living American writer to have his works published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. 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. In 2012 he won Spain's highest honor, the Prince of Asturias Award, and in 2013 he received France's highest honor, Commander of the Legion of Honor.
Other books by Philip Roth
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