About the Author

PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004.” Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018.

Reviews

“Roth manages to tease from his subjects the convictions that fuel their work and the vulnerabilities that make them human.... Yet another example of [his] clarity of purpose and singular intelligence.” —The New York Times Book Review

“[Roth] brings out something adamantine and irreducible about each of his interlocutors.... Ring[s] with what his readers will recognize as ... Rothian intelligence.” —The New York Times

“Fascinating glimpses of some of the deans of postwar literature [and] a working diagram of the very engine that makes Roth run.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A wonderful book.... This is a book about urgency, responsibility and dedication in the face of mortal danger, and Roth asks all the right questions—and he is unafraid to do so at length. The answers are consistently enlightening, whether about morality, influence or technique." —The Guardian

Roth continues to be feverishly productive after American Pastoral vaulted him back onto the novelists' A-list in the late '90s, and last year's The Human Stain kept hiim there. This book is a grab bag of conversations and exchanges of letters with other writers, and essays, which originally appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. Among his correspondents are Primo Levi and novelists Aharon Appelfeld, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Edna O'Brien and Milan Kundera. In none of these conversations does the reader get a clear picture of both parties, since Roth's overlong questions and self-referential statements rarely turn the spotlight away from himself, and most of the chatter is about writers' status and career, rather than artistry or real "shop talk." Czech novelist Ivan Klima is coarsely described as resembling "a highly intellectually evolved Ringo Starr." There is an abstruse and cryptic pair of letters exchanged with Mary McCarthy, and a merciless memoir of novelist Bernard Malamud, who when dying read aloud the beginning of a new novel written with immense difficulty, only to have Roth pick holes in the work: "Trying to be constructive, I suggested that the narrative opened too slowly and that he might better begin further along.... " Collections and individual readers would do better to buy copies of the novels from decades ago that established this writer's fame than look here for unplumbed depths. (Sept.) Forecast: This book should get mileage out of the names of Roth and his high-profile interlocutors, but even browsers will pick up on its miscellaneous quality, and most of the pieces will be familiar to readers of smart set periodicals. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

"Roth manages to tease from his subjects the convictions that fuel their work and the vulnerabilities that make them human.... Yet another example of [his] clarity of purpose and singular intelligence." -The New York Times Book Review

"[Roth] brings out something adamantine and irreducible about each of his interlocutors.... Ring[s] with what his readers will recognize as ... Rothian intelligence." -The New York Times

"Fascinating glimpses of some of the deans of postwar literature [and] a working diagram of the very engine that makes Roth run." -Los Angeles Times Book Review

"A wonderful book.... This is a book about urgency, responsibility and dedication in the face of mortal danger, and Roth asks all the right questions-and he is unafraid to do so at length. The answers are consistently enlightening, whether about morality, influence or technique." -The Guardian