Book description
In Philip Roth's intimate intellectual encounters 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 individualised 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 analyses the mix of politics and
sexuality that made him a subversive write 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.
In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American
Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the
White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to
John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He
has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics
Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005
The Plot Against America received the Society of American
Historians' Prize for "the outstanding historical novel on an
American theme for 2003-2004."
Recently Roth received PEN's two most prestigious prizes: in 2006
the PEN/Nabokov Award 'for a body of work...of enduring originality
and consummate craftmanship' and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for
achievement in American Fiction, given to a writer whose 'scale of
achievement over a sustained career...places him or her in the highest
rank of American literature.'
Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published
in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The
last of the eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.
