Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work

Abstract

In Philip Roth's intimate intellectual encounters with an international & diverse cast of writers, they explore the importance of region, politics, & history in their work & trace the imaginative path by which a writer's highly individualized art is informed by the wider conditions of life. Milan Kundera & Czechoslovakia, Primo Levi & Auschwitz, Edna O'Brien & Ireland, Aharon Appelfeld & Bukovina, Ivan Klima & Prague, Isaac Singer & Warsaw, Bruno Schulz & Poland -- what is the intricate transaction between the susceptible writer & the provocative time & place? Roth's questions go to the original conditions that stimulate the narrative impulse, & he puts them to writers who are as attuned to the subtleties of literature as to the influence of the surrounding society. Also included here are appreciative portraits of two of Roth's late friends, each transfixed till the end by his artistic vocation -- the writer Bernard Malamud & the painter Philip Guston -- as well as several cartoons drawn by Guston, a gift to Roth to illustrate his novella The Breast & printed here for the first time. Shop Talk concludes with Roth's essay "Rereading Saul Bellow," a vivid presentation of Bellow's achievement and, in the spirit of this collection, very much a colleague's reading.

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