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Book

Why write? : collected nonfiction, 1960-2013

Call Number

  • 814 R845 (CEN)

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Edition

The Library of America edition.

Publication Information

New York, N.Y. : The Library of America, [2017]

Physical Description

xiii, 452 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm.

Uniform Title

Works. Selections

Summary

"Throughout a unparalleled literary career that includes two National Book Awards (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959 and Sabbath's Theater, 1995), the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (American Pastoral, 1997), the National Book Critics Circle Award (The Counterlife, 1986), and the National Humanities Medal (awarded by President Obama in 2011), among many other honors, Philip Roth has produced an extraordinary body of nonfiction writing on a wide range of topics: his own work and that of the writers he admires, the creative process, and the state of American culture. This work is collected for the first time in Why Write?, the tenth and final volume in the Library of America's definitive Philip Roth edition. Here is Roth's selection of the indispensable core of Reading Myself and Others, the entirety of the 2001 book Shop Talk, and "Explanations," a collection of fourteen later pieces brought together here for the first time, six never before published. Among the essays gathered are "My Uchronia," an account of the genesis of The Plot Against America, a novel grounded in the insight that "all the assurances are provisional, even here in a two-hundred-year-old democracy"; "Errata," the unabridged version of the "Open Letter to Wikipedia" published on The New Yorker's website in 2012 to counter the online encyclopedia's egregious errors about his life and work; and "The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction," a speech delivered on the occasion of his eightieth birthday that celebrates the "refractory way of living" of Sabbath's Theater's Mickey Sabbath. Also included are two lengthy interviews given after Roth's retirement, which take stock of a lifetime of work."--Amazon.

Notes

Edition statement from book jacket spine.

Contents

  • From Reading myself and others. "I always wanted you to admire my fasting," or, Looking at Kafka ; Writing American fiction ; New Jewish stereotypes ; Writing about Jews ; On Portnoy's complaint ; In response to those who have asked me : How did you come to write that book, anyway? ; Imagining Jews ; Writing and the powers that be ; After eight books ; Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur ; Interview with the London Sunday Times ; Interview with the Paris Review ; Interview on Zuckerman
  • Shop talk : a writer and his colleagues and their work. Conversation in Turin with Primo Levi ; Conversation in Jerusalem with Aharon Appelfeld ; Conversation in Prague with Ivan Klíma ; Conversation in New York with Isaac Bashevis Singer about Bruno Schulz ; Conversation in London and Connecticut with Milan Kundera ; Conversation in London with Edna O'Brien ; An exchange with Mary McCarthy ; Pictures of Malamud ; Pictures by Guston ; Rereading Saul Bellow
  • Explanations. Juice or gravy? ; Patrimony ; Yiddish/English ; "I have fallen in love with American names" ; My Uchronia ; Eric Duncan ; Errata ; "Tyranny is better organized than freedom" ; A Czech education ; The primacy of Ludus ; Interview on The ghost writer ; Interview with Svenska Dagbladet ; Forty-five years on ; The ruthless intimacy of fiction
  • Chronolgy.

Subjects

Genres

Essays.