Sabbath's Theater

By Philip Roth

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Mickey Sabbath, a sixty-four-year-old former puppeteer, lives in a New England village in this 1995 novel by Philip Roth, which received the National Book Award for Fiction. After the death of Drenka, his longtime lover, Sabbath sets off on a wild, grieving journey to New York, where he revisits his past, offends nearly everyone he meets, and wonders whether to end his life or go on living.

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• Barack Obama: “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, they are steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up — what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up.”