Shop Talk

Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work is a collection of previously published interviews with important 20th-century writers by novelist Philip Roth. Among the writers interviewed are Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, Ivan Klima, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Milan Kundera, and Edna O'Brien. In addition, the book contains a discussion with Mary McCarthy about Roth's novel The Counterlife and a New Yorker essay on Saul Bellow. Roth's trip to Israel to interview Appelfeld inspired his novel Operation Shylock.

Table of contents

• Conversation in New York with Isaac Bashevis Singer about Bruno Schulz, from The New York Times Book Review, 1976
• Conversation in London and Connecticut with Milan Kundera, from The New York Times Book Review, 1980
• Conversation in London with Edna O'Brien, from The New York Times Book Review, 1984
• Pictures of Malamud, from The New York Times Book Review, 1986
• A Man Saved by His Skills. Conversation in Turin with Primo Levi, from The New York Times Book Review, 12 ottobre 1986
• Conversation in Jerusalem with Aharon Appelfeld, from The New York Times Book Review, 1988
• Pictures of Guston, from Vanity Fair, 1989
• Conversation in Prague with Ivan Klíma, from The New York Review of Books, 1990
• An Exchange with Mary McCarthy, from The New Yorker, 1998
• Rereading Saul Bellow, from The New Yorker, 2000

Reception

Author Daniel Handler, reviewing the book in the San Francisco Chronicle, called it "hodgepodge", with conversations that "fall flat" and were sometimes " vague and unsatisfying". On the other hand, Nicholas Lezard, in The Guardian, found that "Roth asks all the right questions", with the answers being "consistently enlightening".

References