Deeply
intimate encounters between the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
American Pastoral and the greatest writers and artists of the 20th
century-from Primo Levi and Milan Kundera to Edna O'Brien and Philip
Guston.

Roth manages to tease from his subjects the convictions that fuel their work and the vulnerabilities that make them human. -The New York Times Book Review

In Philip Roth’s intimate intellectual conversations with an international
and diverse cast of writers, they explore the importance of region, politics
and history in their work and trace the imaginative path by which a writer’s
highly individualized art is informed by the wider conditions of life.

With Primo Levi, Roth discusses the stubborn core of rationality that
helped the Italian chemist-writer survive the demented laboratory of
Auschwitz. With Milan Kundera, he analyzes the mix of politics and sexuality
that made him the most subversive writer in communist Czechoslovakia. With
Edna O'Brien, he explores the circumstances that have forced generations of
Irish writers into exile.

Elsewhere Roth offers appreciative portraits of two
friends-the writer Bernard Malamud and the painter Philip Guston-at the end
of their careers, and gives us a masterful assessment of the work of Saul
Bellow. Intimate, charming, and crackling with ideas about the interplay
between imagination and the writer’s historical situation, Shop Talk is a
literary symposium of the highest level, presided over by America’s foremost
novelist.