Reading Myself and Others

By Philip Roth

Book Overview

Fascinating interviews, essays, and articles spanning a quarter century on writing, baseball, American fiction, and American Jews--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

"An illuminating...glimpse of the theory and practice that have made Roth a major figure in American fiction." --Chicago Daily News

Here is Philip Roth on himself and his work and the controversies it's engendered. Here too are Roth's writings on the Eastern European writers he has always championed, and so much more. The essential collection of nonfiction by a true American master, Reading Myself and Others features his famed long interview with the Paris Review.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679749071
• ISBN13: 9780679749073
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.0" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

He will make you laugh and he may make you cry

Interviews, articles , essays. An essay on Kafka which turns into a moving fiction on what would have happened to Kafka had he come as a war refugee to Roth's New Jersey. Writing about the East-European authors he has championed, about the claim of the Jewish community that his writing has not served it very well, about the novel, and the American reality which in its extravagance seems to produce more than any fiction can do, an essay on The Newark Public Library one on Cambodia, on 'TheBaseball Years' on his protege Alan Lelchuk, reflections on his own books, Portnoy, the Breast, the Great American novel, Life as a Man. A rich collection by the funniest and certainly one of the best American writers of the last half- century.

Please, Mr. Roth, Update This Collection

Not only is Philip Roth perhaps America's greatest living novelist, he is one of the nation's very best literary critics as well. This book is a compilation of essays and interviews he published before 1974. Included is his piercing analyses of the accusations of anti-Semitism made against him as well as "Writing American Fiction", the classic essay where he declares that the novelist's imagination can't possibly keep up with the extravagance of American reality. Also included is the short story/essay "Looking at Kafka" which may be the best thing ever written about that quintessential modernist author. Roth has written enough criticism in the years since this book was published to assemble a whole new volume: please, we badly need an update!