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.
Author: Philip Roth Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Published: 10/08/2002 Pages: 176 Binding Type: Paperback Weight: 0.43lbs Size: 8.10h x 5.16w x 0.48d ISBN: 9780375714139
Review Citation(s): New York Times 11/10/2002 pg. 24
About the Author PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts atthe White House and in 2002 the highest award of the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction.He twice won the National Book Award and the NationalBook Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/FaulknerAward three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America receivedthe Society of American Historians' Prize for "the outstandinghistorical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004."Roth received PEN's two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National HumanitiesMedal at the White House, and was later named the fourthrecipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018.
