 Front cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Philip Roth |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Otto Dix, Sailor and girl, 1925 |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
Publication date | 1995 |
| Pages | 451 |
| ISBN | 0-395-73982-9 |
| OCLC | 31970961 |
Sabbath's Theater is a novel by Philip Roth about the exploits of 64-year-old Mickey Sabbath. It won the 1995 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. [1] The cover is a detail of Sailor and Girl (1925) by German painter Otto Dix.
Mickey Sabbath (modeled after American Jewish painter R.B. Kitaj [2] ) is an unproductive, out-of-work, former puppeteer with a strong affinity for prostitutes, adultery, and the casual sexual encounter. Sabbath takes great pleasure in his status as the (prototypical) "dirty old man." He takes an equal pleasure in manipulating the people around him, primarily women—in a sense, they play the same role as his puppets. The loss of a decades-long wingman—the equally depraved Drenka—precipitates a crisis in a life he has long considered an utter failure. Sabbath wonders whether he should simply take his own life, thereby heeding the advice of the ghost of his departed mother, a frequent visitor who urges suicide as the fitting end for his failed life.
Literary critic Harold Bloom has declared Sabbath's Theater Roth's "masterwork." [3] Prominent literary critic James Wood told The Morning News , "I am a great fan of Sabbath’s Theater, it was an extraordinary book." [4] New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani found it hard to finish and "distasteful and disingenuous". [5]
It won the National Book Award for fiction [1] —thirty-five years after Roth's debut novel Goodbye Columbus won the same award (1960). It was also a finalist for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize. [6]
After Roth's passing, the New York Times asked several prominent authors to name their favorite Roth book. Claire Messud picked Sabbath's Theater, writing: "The novel, outrageous when it was first published is all but inconceivable today; which is part of what makes it literarily important. Roth fearlessly embraces the ugliness of the aging degenerate, with Dostoevskian zeal. He manages to do so with such wit and in such pyrotechnic prose that this reader, at least, doesn’t hurl the book across the room." [7]
John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic, and literary critic. One of only four writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once, Updike published more than twenty novels, more than a dozen short-story collections, as well as poetry, art and literary criticism and children's books during his career.
The Pulitzer Prize for Criticism has been presented since 1970 to a newspaper writer in the United States who has demonstrated 'distinguished criticism'. Recipients of the award are chosen by an independent board and officially administered by Columbia University. The Pulitzer Committee issues an official citation explaining the reasons for the award.
The Human Stain is a novel by Philip Roth, published May 5, 2000. The book is set in Western Massachusetts in the late 1990s. It is narrated by 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in several earlier Roth novels, and who also figures in both American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), two books that form a loose trilogy with The Human Stain. Zuckerman acts largely as an observer as the complex story of the protagonist, Coleman Silk, a retired professor of classics, is slowly revealed.
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short story writer.
American literature is literature written or produced in the United States of America and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition thus is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature, but also includes literature of other traditions produced in the United States and in other immigrant languages. Furthermore, a rich tradition of oral storytelling exists amongst Native American tribes.
Underworld is a 1997 novel by American writer Don DeLillo. The novel is centered on the efforts of Nick Shay, a waste management executive who grew up in the Bronx, to trace the history of the baseball that won the New York Giants the pennant in 1951, and encompasses numerous subplots drawn from American history in the second half of the twentieth century. Described as both postmodernist and a reaction to postmodernism, it examines themes of nuclear proliferation, waste, and the contribution of individual lives to the course of history.
Operation Shylock: A Confession is a 1993 novel by American novelist Philip Roth.
Anne Tyler is an American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published twenty-four novels, including Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Breathing Lessons won the prize in 1989. She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Tyler's twentieth novel, A Spool of Blue Thread, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015, and Redhead By the Side of the Road was longlisted for the same award in 2020. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail", her "rigorous and artful style", and her "astute and open language."
Chang-rae Lee is a Korean-American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University. He was previously Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton and director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.
The Ghost Writer is a 1979 novel by the American author Philip Roth. It is the first of Roth's novels narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, one of the author's putative fictional alter egos, and constitutes the first book in his Zuckerman Bound trilogy. The novel touches on themes common to many Roth works, including identity, the responsibilities of authors to their subjects, and the condition of Jews in America. Parts of the novel are a reprise of The Diary of Anne Frank.
Independence Day is a 1995 novel by Richard Ford and the sequel to Ford's 1986 novel The Sportswriter. This novel is the second in what is now a four-part series, the first being The Sportswriter. It was followed by The Lay of the Land (2006) and Let Me Be Frank With You (2014). Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1996, becoming the first novel ever to win both awards in a single year.
Michiko Kakutani is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.
Joshua Aaron Cohen is an American novelist and story writer, best known for his works Witz (2010), Book of Numbers (2015), and Moving Kings (2017). Cohen is the recipient of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for his novel The Netanyahus (2021).
Adam Haslett is an American fiction writer and journalist. His debut short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, and his second novel, Imagine Me Gone, were both finalists for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Berlin. In 2017, he won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Adam Johnson is an American novelist and short story writer. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2012 novel, The Orphan Master's Son, and the National Book Award for his 2015 story collection Fortune Smiles. He is also a professor of English at Stanford University with a focus on creative writing.
Harold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was described as "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." Following the publication of his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and a novel. During his lifetime, he edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. Bloom was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1995.
Nora Okja Keller is a Korean American author. Her 1997 breakthrough work of fiction, Comfort Woman, and her second book (2002), Fox Girl, focus on multigenerational trauma resulting from Korean women's experiences as sex slaves, euphemistically called comfort women, for Japanese and American troops during World War II and the ongoing Korean War.
Benjamin Taylor is an American writer whose work has appeared in a number of publications including The Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, Bookforum, BOMB, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, The Georgia Review, Raritan Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, Provincetown Arts and The Reading Room. He is a founding member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty of The New School in New York City, and has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, Bennington College and Columbia University. He has served as Secretary of the Board of Trustees of PEN American Center, has been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and was awarded the Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger Residency at Yaddo. A Trustee of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Inc., he is also a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2012 - 2013. Taylor's biography of Marcel Proust, Proust: The Search, was published in October 2015 by Yale University Press as part of its newly launched Yale Jewish Lives series.
Paco's Story is 1987 novel by Larry Heinemann. The novel is his second and it won the 1987 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction in a major surprise that has remained controversial. In particular, the New York Times was surprised by the win, soliciting commentary from other critical reviewers, like the LA Times.
Omar El Akkad is an Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist, whose novel What Strange Paradise was the winner of the 2021 Giller Prize.
https://m.jpost.com/Jerusalem-Report/In-YourFace-Outsider
| General | |
|---|---|
| National libraries | |
 | This article about a 1990s novel is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. See guidelines for writing about novels. Further suggestions might be found on the article's talk page. |
