Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work

By Philip Roth

Book Overview

Deeply intimate encounters between the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral and the greatest writers and artists of the 20th century--from Primo Levi and Milan Kundera to Edna O'Brien and Philip Guston. "Roth manages to tease from his subjects the convictions that fuel their work and the vulnerabilities that make them human." -- The New York Times Book Review In Philip Roth's intimate intellectual conversations with an international and diverse cast of writers, they explore the importance of region, politics and history in their work and trace the imaginative path by which a writer's highly individualized art is informed by the wider conditions of life. With Primo Levi, Roth discusses the stubborn core of rationality that helped the Italian chemist-writer survive the demented laboratory of Auschwitz. With Milan Kundera, he analyzes the mix of politics and sexuality that made him the most subversive writer in communist Czechoslovakia. With Edna O'Brien, he explores the circumstances that have forced generations of Irish writers into exile. Elsewhere Roth offers appreciative portraits of two friends--the writer Bernard Malamud and the painter Philip Guston--at the end of their careers, and gives us a masterful assessment of the work of Saul Bellow. Intimate, charming, and crackling with ideas about the interplay between imagination and the writer's historical situation, Shop Talk is a literary symposium of the highest level, presided over by America's foremost novelist.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375714138
• ISBN13: 9780375714139
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.2" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Writers are All Strange Creatures!

I first bought this book because I was doing research on Philip Roth. I did find it interesting at times. I thought he should have mentioned that Primo Levi committed suicide later on. I enjoy him with other writers. I think we writers are a strange bunch of creatures. After all, the process of writing can be long, complicated, distracted, frightening, and even procrastinated by the writers themselves. Let's face it, writers like Roth, Levi, Singer, and others are always going to be mysterious to those who don't write. Believe me, it takes years to be good at anything and then you second guess yourself. If you're not your worst critic, than you will still put out stuff to please the audiences. I thought it was fascinating that Roth traveled to Turin to meet with Levi who survived the Holocaust and returned to his Italian home. I thought it was fascinating that he spent time with Malamud and Singer, other Jewish writers. No matter what your ethnicity or religion, writers are all strange creatures, myself included.

A small but excellent Rothian miscellany

Roth writes more about other writers here than he does about himself. He played a significant role in helping Eastern European writers from lands of repression break the silence imposed by the Iron Curtain. Here he talks with two of the best of them, Milan Kundera and Ivan Klima. He also has conversations with two of the most important writers about the 'Holocaust', Primo Levi and Aharon Applefeld. There is a short interview with I.B. Singer in which he asks about Bruno Schultz. Roth is not simply a very careful and considered craftsman, he is one who has learned much from studying the writing of others. In this work we see his capacity to let 'the other' have the floor. An outstanding small work, which also tells us something about the tastes and values of one of America's great writers, Philip Roth.