Sabbath's Theater

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.

"For me, the book of the year - maybe the decade - is Sabbath's Theater...funny...moving, imaginative, deep... A masterpiece" Times Literary Supplement "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 "In time this will be seen as Roth's best novel so far" -- James Wood Guardian, Books of the Year "A work of near-heroic vitality and cunning" Sunday Telegraph "Absolutely filthy book with one of the most unpleasantly priapic and desperate anti-heroes in modern literature. A delight" -- Nigel Lindsay Daily Express