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.

者簡介：

菲利普·羅斯（1933—　）　1997年，菲利普·羅斯因《美國牧歌》獲得普利策奬。1998年，他在白宮獲頒美國國傢藝術勛章；2002年，他榮獲美國藝術與文學學院最高奬項小說金奬，該奬曾頒給約翰·多斯·帕索斯、威廉·福剋納及索爾·貝婁等人。他曾兩次獲得美國全國圖書奬、福剋納筆會奬和美國全國書評傢協會奬。

2005年，《反美陰謀》作為“2003—2004年以美國為主題的卓越曆史小說”而獲得美國曆史學傢協會奬，並被《紐約時報書評》、《舊金山紀事報》、《波士頓環球報》、《芝加哥太陽時報》、《洛杉磯時報書評》、《華盛頓郵報圖書世界》、《時代》周刊、《新聞周刊》等眾多報刊提名為年度最佳圖書。在英國，《反美陰謀》一書獲得W.H.史密斯奬年度最佳圖書奬，讓羅斯成為該奬46年曆史上首位兩次問鼎的作傢。

2005年，羅斯也成為第三位在世時作品就由美國文庫齣版綜閤性、定論性版本的作傢。該八捲本文集的最後一捲定於2013年齣版。