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.

• 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

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".^[1] On the other hand, Nicholas Lezard, in The Guardian, found that "Roth asks all the right questions", with the answers being "consistently enlightening".^[2]