Philip Roth: Shop Talk - A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work

Description

In Philip Roth's intimate intellectual encounters 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 individualised art is informed by the wider conditions of life. Milan Kundera and Czechoslovakia, Primo Levi and Auschwitz, Edna O'Brien and Ireland, Aharon Appelfeld and Bukovina, Ivan Klima and Prague, Isaac Singer and Warsaw, Bruno Schulz and Poland - what is the intricate transaction between the susceptible writer and the provocative time and place? Roth's questions go to the original conditions that stimulate the narrative impulse, and he puts them to writers who are as attuned to the subtleties of literature as to the influence of the surrounding society.