Library of America #205

Operation Shylock -- Sabbath's theater

This sixth volume of The Library of America's definitive edition of Philip Roth's collected works gathers two novels that marked the beginning of a decade-long creative explosion--one remarkable in an older writer and one heralded by critics as unparalleled in American literary history. In the fiendishly imaginative Operation Shylock, Philip Roth encounters a look-alike who claims Roth's identity and who tours Israel promoting a bizarre reverse exodus of the Jews--a look-alike whose proselytizing in his name the authentic Roth is intent on stopping, even if that means impersonating his own impersonator. "This splendidly wicked book" is how the critic Frank Kermode described Sabbath's Theater (1995), Roth's comic creation of epic proportions, whose gargantuan hero, Mickey Sabbath, grieving the loss of his unsurpassable mistress, embarks on a turbulent journey into his past besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most. --notes by editor Ross Miller