Philip Roth: Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013

Philip Roth’s definitive edition of his essential statements on writing, literature, his novels, and American life More

Overview
News & Views
Table of Contents

Overview

Video | News Revisiting Portnoy’s complaints, 50 years later, with Bernard Avishai

News Library of America’s Max Rudin: Philip Roth, native son

News Library of America mourns the death of Philip Roth, 1933–2018

Tracing the full span of Philip Roth’s career—from the early controversies surrounding the stories in Goodbye, Columbus to his recent assessments of his work and corrections of the record—Why Write? shows at every turn the vigor, acuity, and persuasive power of Roth’s brilliant nonfiction. As a retrospective summation of his essays and interviews, it is essential reading in tandem with Roth’s novels, both for the discussions of his own books and as a record of his profound engagement with other writers: Kafka, Bellow, Malamud, and the leading figures of Cold War–era Czechoslovakia among them.

Divided into three sections, Why Write? begins with Roth’s selection of the indispensable core of Reading Myself and Others, first published in 1975 and expanded for a second edition ten years later. It opens with the remarkable hybrid story-essay, “‘I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting’; or, Looking at Kafka,” a critical evaluation that yields to a fictional imagination of Kafka as young Roth’s Hebrew School teacher in 1940s Newark, the first of the provocative forays into speculative alternative realities that would take shape in novels like The Ghost Writer and The Plot Against America. In the essays and interviews given in the wake of the explosive release of Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth clarifies how he sought to “raise obscenity to the level of a subject,” provides sharp-edged insights into an America wracked by political turmoil and sexual revolution, and defends the imaginative freedom of writers and readers alike.

The volume’s second section presents in its entirety the 2001 book Shop Talk, a series of conversations with writers such as Aharon Appelfeld, Primo Levi, and Edna O’Brien, as well as essays on Malamud, Bellow, and the artist Philip Guston. The collection highlights Roth’s skill as an astute literary interlocutor, engaged with writers whose traditions, assumptions, and experience can differ markedly from those of the American world of his own fiction.

The concluding section, “Explanations,” comprises fourteen later pieces collected here for the first time, six of them 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; “Forty-Five Years On,” Roth’s absolute last word on Portnoy; and “The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction,” a speech delivered on the occasion of his eightieth birthday that evokes the Newark of Roth’s childhood and examines 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: “Morning after morning for fifty years, I faced the next page defenseless and unprepared. Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation.”

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
News & Views

Video | News Revisiting Portnoy’s complaints, 50 years later, with Bernard Avishai

News Library of America’s Max Rudin: Philip Roth, native son

News Library of America mourns the death of Philip Roth, 1933–2018

Interviews “Here I am”: Philip Roth reflects on his half-century career as a writer

Story of the Week Philip Roth, “Patrimony”
Table of Contents

Preface

ONE: 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

TWO: 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 of Guston
Rereading Saul Bellow

THREE: 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

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ISBN: 978-1-59853-540-2 465 pages

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N° 300 Library of America Series

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Philip Roth: Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013

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