Why write? : collected nonfiction, 1960-2013

The Resource Why write? : collected nonfiction, 1960-2013
Label
Why write? : collected nonfiction, 1960-2013
Title remainder
collected nonfiction, 1960-2013
Statement of responsibility
Philip Roth
Title variation
  • Philip Roth, why write?
  • Collected nonfiction, 1960-2013
Creator
Author
Subject
Genre
Language
eng
Summary
"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.""--Publisher's description
Member of
Biography type
contains biographical information
Cataloging source
YDX
Dewey number
814/.54
Illustrations
illustrations
Index
index present
LC call number
PS3568.O855
LC item number
A6 2017
Literary form
non fiction
Nature of contents
bibliography
Series statement
The Library of America
Series volume
300

Context

Context of Why write? : collected nonfiction, 1960-2013

Work of

Structured data from the Bibframe namespace is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by Mercer County Library. Additional terms may apply to data associated with third party namespaces.
Processing Feedback ...