It is such a treat when a great author talks to other authors about their calling or gives the readers his opinion on their works. Shop Talk by Philip Roth is such a book and I feel I am enriched because of the joy of reading it and my reading list’s new additions. Philip Roth accomplishes most of his give-and-take with the other authors through interviews, especially in the beginning parts. Then there is correspondence through letters and Roth’s personal views, and even the mention of Philip Guston, the painter and his daughter Musa.

The beginning sections particularly impressed me because the authors interviewed were Holocaust survivors and they were all such winners, such as Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, Ivan Klima. One thing these authors have in common is they all were impressed to some degree by Kafka.

I also liked very much Roth’s conversations about Bruno Schultz with Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Then there were the sections on Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, and Milan Kundera, already esteemed authors for me. The two women authors, Edna O’Brien and Mary McCarthy, were given space in the book as well.

Most of these authors were physically separated from the lands they were born in, and the psychological rift this separation created was evident in the ways they answered Roth or talked about their art, which is highly personal most of the time. Any artist who can create under terrible hardships deserves a big applause, as most if not all these authors do.

As the result of reading this book, I hope Philip Roth keeps on writing, whatever it is he wishes to write, fiction or non-fiction; his work I am sure will always be memorable.

seeing how accomplished authors look at other accomplished authors' works.

the ideas and words of the authors who survived the Holocaust.

is Philip Roth the winner of Pulitzer in 1997 and many other awards, among them several Pen-Faulkner, several National Book awards, National Books Critics'awards and too many others.

It shows this author's personal views on other authors and life.

That there is little space given to women authors did not bother me much because that only shows the era in which this author became who he is.

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Created Dec 14, 2017 at 7:57pm • Submit your own review...