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 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.

者简介：

菲利普·罗斯（1933—　）　1997年，菲利普·罗斯因《美国牧歌》获得普利策奖。1998年，他在白宫获颁美国国家艺术勋章；2002年，他荣获美国艺术与文学学院最高奖项小说金奖，该奖曾颁给约翰·多斯·帕索斯、威廉·福克纳及索尔·贝娄等人。他曾两次获得美国全国图书奖、福克纳笔会奖和美国全国书评家协会奖。

2005年，《反美阴谋》作为“2003—2004年以美国为主题的卓越历史小说”而获得美国历史学家协会奖，并被《纽约时报书评》、《旧金山纪事报》、《波士顿环球报》、《芝加哥太阳时报》、《洛杉矶时报书评》、《华盛顿邮报图书世界》、《时代》周刊、《新闻周刊》等众多报刊提名为年度最佳图书。在英国，《反美阴谋》一书获得W.H.史密斯奖年度最佳图书奖，让罗斯成为该奖46年历史上首位两次问鼎的作家。

2005年，罗斯也成为第三位在世时作品就由美国文库出版综合性、定论性版本的作家。该八卷本文集的最后一卷定于2013年出版。