Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work

In a sequence of intimate conversations with some of the most influential and insightful writers of the 20th century, Roth explores the importance of region, politics and history in their work and that of their predecessors.

“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

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 candor 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 caliber, profoundly revelatory and consistently enlightening.