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Sabbath's Theater
Play sample
  • Published: 25 October 1996
  • ISBN: 9780099582014
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 496
  • RRP: $28.99

Sabbath's Theater

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Aug 2011
Audiobook
4 Jan 2024
Paperback
25 Oct 1996
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Reissued in electric new backlist style, Sabbath's Theater is Philip Roth's astounding masterpiece

'A work of near heroic vitality and cunning' Sunday Telegraph

At sixty-four Mickey Sabbath is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous; sex is an obsession and a principle, an instrument of perpetual misrule in his daily existence.

But after the death of his long-time mistress - an erotic free spirit whose great taste for the impermissible matches his own - Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past. Bereft and grieving, tormented by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction...

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
  • Published: 25 October 1996
  • ISBN: 9780099582014
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 496
  • RRP: $28.99

About the author

Philip Roth

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933, to second-generation Americans Bess and Herman. He grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood his writing returned to time and again. Roth received the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), but it was his fourth, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) which secured his reputation as one of America’s finest writers, and American Pastoral (1997) which won the Pulitzer Prize. Roth wrote thirty-one books in all, winning the International Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. He was presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively. Roth died aged eighty-five on 22 May 2018, six years after retiring from writing.
portrait photo of Philip Roth

Also by Philip Roth

The Plot Against America
Nemesis
Exit Ghost
I Married a Communist
The Dying Animal
The Humbling
Indignation
See all

Praise for Sabbath's Theater

Sabbath explodes some mad genie out of his bottle... Sabbath's Theater has more firestorming prose than any other novel I have read this year

Observer

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

Absolutely filthy book with one of the most unpleasantly priapic and desperate anti-heroes in modern literature. A delight

Nigel Lindsay, Daily Express

A post-war American masterpiece

Daily Telegraph

This is a wickedly splendid book

Frank Kermode

In time this will be seen as Roth's best novel

Guardian

This is the first of Roth’s late masterworks, and the most powerful

Orlando Figes, The Week