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.

Works by Philip Roth
Fiction
  • Goodbye, Columbus
  • Letting Go
  • When She Was Good
  • Portnoy's Complaint
  • Our Gang
  • The Great American Novel
  • My Life As a Man
  • Sabbath's Theater
Kepesh Novels
  • The Breast
  • The Professor of Desire
  • The Dying Animal
Zuckerman Novels
  • The Ghost Writer
  • Zuckerman Unbound
  • The Anatomy Lesson
  • The Prague Orgy
  • The Counterlife
  • American Pastoral
  • I Married a Communist
  • The Human Stain
  • Exit Ghost
Roth Novels
  • Deception
  • Operation Shylock
  • The Plot Against America
Nemeses: Short Novels
  • Everyman
  • Indignation
  • The Humbling
  • Nemesis
Short Stories
  • "The Conversion of the Jews"
  • "Defender of the Faith"
  • "The Kind of Person I am"
  • "Epstein"
  • "You Can't Tell a Man by the Song He Sings"
  • "Eli, the Fanatic"
  • "Philosophy, or Something Like That"
  • "The Box of Truths"
  • "The Fence"
  • "Armando and the Frauds"
  • "The Final Delivery of Mr. Thorn"
  • "The Day It Snowed"
  • "The Contest for Aaron Gold"
  • "Heard Melodies Are Sweeter"
  • "Expect the Vandals"
  • "The Love Vessel"
  • "The Good Girl"
  • "The Mistaken"
  • "Novotny's Pain"
  • "Psychoanalytic Special"
  • "An Actor's Life for Me"
  • "On the Air"
  • "His Mistress's Voice"
  • "Smart Money"
  • "The Ultimatum"
  • "Drenka's Men"
  • "Communist"
Collections
  • Zuckerman Bound
  • A Philip Roth Reader
  • Library of America series
Non-fiction
Memoirs
  • The Facts
  • Patrimony
On Writing
  • Reading Myself and Others
  • Shop Talk
Adaptations
Films
  • Goodbye, Columbus
  • Portnoy's Complaint
  • The Human Stain
  • Elegy
Philip Roth bibliography


Famous quotes containing the words shop and/or talk:

    For through the painter must you see his skill,
    To find where your true image pictured lies,
    Which in my bosom’s shop is hanging still,
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)