Shop Talk

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 Talkis a literary symposium of the highest calibre, profoundly revelatory and consistently enlightening.

Philip Roth (1933-2018) won the Pulitzer Prize forAmerican Pastoralin 1997.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 twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005The Plot Against Americareceived the Society of American Historians Prize for the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 20032004.

Roth received PENs 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. In 2011 Roth won the International Man Booker Prize.