Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work

Roth, Philip

ISBN 10: 0618153144 / ISBN 13: 9780618153145

Published by Mariner Books (edition First Edition), 2001

About this Item

It's a preowned item in good condition and includes all the pages. It may have some general signs of wear and tear, such as markings, highlighting, slight damage to the cover, minimal wear to the binding, etc., but they will not affect the overall reading experience.

Seller Inventory # 0618153144-11-1

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work
• Publisher: Mariner Books (edition First Edition)
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0618153144
• ISBN 13: 9780618153145
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

<div>In Philip Roth&#8217;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&#8217;s highly individualized art is informed by the wider conditions of life.<br> Milan Kundera and Czechoslovakia, Primo Levi and Auschwitz, Edna O&#8217;Brien and Ireland, Aharon Appelfeld and Bukovina, Ivan Kl&#237;ma and Prague, Isaac Singer and Warsaw, Bruno Schulz and Poland &#8212; what is the intricate transaction between the susceptible writer and the provocative time and place? Roth&#8217;s questions go to the original conditions that stimulate the narrative impulse, and he puts them to writers who are as attuned to the subtleties of literature as to the influence of the surrounding society.<br> Also included here are appreciative portraits of two of Roth&#8217;s late friends, each transfixed till the end by his artistic vocation &#8212; the writer Bernard Malamud and the painter Philip Guston &#8212; as well as several cartoons drawn by Guston, a gift to Roth to illustrate his novella THE BREAST and printed here for the first time. SHOP TALK concludes with Roth&#8217;s essay &#8220;Rereading Saul Bellow,&#8221; a vivid presentation of Bellow&#8217;s achievement and, in the spirit of this collection, very much a colleague&#8217;s reading.</div>

About the Author

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 craftsmanship” 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 eight volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.