Non-Fiction Books

Fascinating interviews, essays, and articles spanning a quarter century on writing, baseball, American fiction, and American Jews—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. "An illuminating...glimpse of the theory and practice that have made Roth a major figure in American fiction." — Chicago Daily News Here is Philip Roth on himself and his work and the controversies it's engendered. Here too are Roth's writings on the Eastern European writers he has always championed, and so much more. The essential collection of nonfiction by a true American master, Reading Myself and Others features his famed long interview with the Paris Review .

The unconventional autobiography of the Pulitzer Prize–winnning, bestselling author—"the most vigorous and truthful of American writers" ( Newsday )—who reshaped our idea of fiction. A work of compelling candor and inventiveness, instructive particularly in its revelation of the interplay between life and art. Philip Roth concentrates on five episodes from his life: his secure city childhood in the thirties and forties; his education in American life at a conventional college; his passionate entanglement, as an ambitious young man, with the angriest person he ever met (the "girl of my dreams" Roth calls her); his clash, as a fledgling writer, with a Jewish establishment outraged by Goodbye, Columbus; and his discovery, in the excesses of the sixties, of an unmined side to his talent that led him to write Portnoy's Complaint. The book concludes surprisingly—in true Rothian fashion—with a sustained assault by the novelist against his proficiencies as an autobiographer.

Deeply intimate encounters between the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral and the greatest writers and artists of the 20th century—from Primo Levi and Milan Kundera to Edna O’Brien and Philip Guston. “Roth manages to tease from his subjects the convictions that fuel their work and the vulnerabilities that make them human.” — The New York Times Book Review In Philip Roth’s intimate intellectual conversations 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.

* This is a rare collection of interviews with Philip Roth and portraits of the man and his work. * In a clear and direct way, Roth speaks openly about his views on a wide range of topics, from US politics and American culture to the role of the writer, living alone and old age.

America’s most celebrated writer returns with a definitive edition of his essential statements on literature, his controversial novels, and the writing life, including including six pieces published here for the first time and many others newly revised. 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. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.