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Shop Talk
  • Published: 1 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446400357
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 176

Shop Talk

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Aug 2011
Paperback
1 Oct 2002
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A brilliant collection of conversations and essays about writers and writing from Philip Roth, reissued in electric new backlist style for October 2016

Philip Roth is the voice of our times.

In a sequence of intimate conversations with some of the most influential and insightful writers of the twentieth century, Roth explores the importance of region, politics and history in their work and that of their predecessors.

What qualities helped Primo Levi survive the demented laboratory of Auschwitz? What does Milan Kundera make of being denounced as a subversive writer in communist Czechoslovakia? What does Edna O'Brien think drove generations of Irish writers into exile?

Between colleagues and friends there is a startling candour seldom found in formal interviews, a sense that the guard is dropped, the ideas unbounded, as the conversations crackle with an urgency of ideas. Shop Talk is a literary symposium of the highest calibre, profoundly revelatory and consistently enlightening.
  • Published: 1 August 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446400357
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 176
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About the author

Philip Roth

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on 19 March 1933, to second-generation Americans Bess and Herman. He grew up in the largely Jewish community of Weequahic, a neighbourhood his writing returned to time and again. Roth received the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), but it was his fourth, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) which secured his reputation as one of America’s finest writers, and American Pastoral (1997) which won the Pulitzer Prize. Roth wrote thirty-one books in all, winning the International Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. He was presented with the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal by Presidents Clinton and Obama, respectively. Roth died aged eighty-five on 22 May 2018, six years after retiring from writing.
portrait photo of Philip Roth

Also by Philip Roth

The Humbling
Nemesis
Indignation
Exit Ghost
The Facts
When She Was Good
Letting Go
See all

Praise for Shop Talk

Fascinating glimpses of some of the deans of postwar literature [and] a working diagram of the very engine that makes Roth run

Los Angeles Times Book Review

Riveting

Sunday Times

Roth brings out something adamantine and irreducible about each of his interlocutors... Rings with what his readers will recognise as Rothian intelligence

New York Times

Roth manages to tease from his subjects the convictions that fuel their work and the vulnerabilities that make them human... Yet another example of [his] clarity of purpose and singular intelligence

New York Times Book Review

The questions are serious, respectful and intelligent, and the interviewees respond in kind

Times Literary Supplement