Shop Talk

Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work is a collection of previously published interviews with important 20th-century writers by novelist Philip Roth. Among the writers interviewed are Primo Levi, Aharon Appelfeld, Ivan Klima, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Milan Kundera, and Edna O'Brien. In addition, the book contains a discussion with Mary McCarthy about Roth's novel The Counterlife and a New Yorker essay on Saul Bellow. Roth's trip to Israel to interview Appelfeld inspired his novel Operation Shylock.

Table of contents

Conversation in New York with Isaac Bashevis Singer about Bruno Schulz, from The New York Times Book Review, 1976

Conversation in London and Connecticut with Milan Kundera, from The New York Times Book Review, 1980

Conversation in London with Edna O'Brien, from The New York Times Book Review, 1984

Pictures of Malamud, from The New York Times Book Review, 1986

A Man Saved by His Skills. Conversation in Turin with Primo Levi, from The New York Times Book Review, 12 ottobre 1986

Conversation in Jerusalem with Aharon Appelfeld, from The New York Times Book Review, 1988

Pictures of Guston, from Vanity Fair, 1989

Conversation in Prague with Ivan Klíma, from The New York Review of Books, 1990

An Exchange with Mary McCarthy, from The New Yorker, 1998

Rereading Saul Bellow, from The New Yorker, 2000

Reception

Author Daniel Handler, reviewing the book in the San Francisco Chronicle, called it "hodgepodge", with conversations that "fall flat" and were sometimes " vague and unsatisfying". On the other hand, Nicholas Lezard, in The Guardian, found that "Roth asks all the right questions", with the answers being "consistently enlightening".