Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work

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.