Description
Book SynopsisPhilip 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.
Trade ReviewRiveting * 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 *
The questions are serious, respectful and intelligent, and the interviewees respond in kind * Times Literary Supplement *
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 *
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 *
