Reading Myself and Others

Zusatztext "An illuminating...glimpse of the theory and practice that have made Roth a major figure in American fiction.... Reveals a first-rate mind." — Chicago Daily News "Roth [is] fearless in his own defense and in defense of literature." —Michael Mewshaw! Texas Monthly "Excellent.... Roth's sensitivity to the balance of situations in his own fiction is Jamesian in its subtlety! and indeed in its nature this book is closer to James's prefaces than to any other book...consistently thoughtful and thoroughly engaging." —Larry McMurtry! The Washington Post Informationen zum Autor PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for  American Pastoral . In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at   the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American   Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction.   He twice won the National Book Award and the National   Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner   Award three times. In 2005  The Plot Against America  received   the Society of American Historians' Prize for "the outstanding   historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004."   Roth received PEN's two most prestigious awards:   in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities   Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth   recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018. Klappentext The interviews, essays, and articles collected here span a quarter century of Philip Roth's distinguished career and "reveal [a] preoccupation with the relationship between the written and the unwritten world." Here is 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 on baseball, American fiction, and American Jews. The essential collection of nonfiction by a true American master, Reading Myself and Others features his long interview with the Paris Review. Leseprobe One Writing and the Powers That Be Tell us first of all about your adolescence-its relationship with the type of American society you have represented in Goodbye, Columbus; your rapport with your family; and if and how you felt the weight of paternal power. An interview conducted by the Italian critic Walter Mauro, for his collection of interviews with writers on the subject of power. (1974) Far from being the classic period of explosion and tempestuous growth, my adolescence was more or less a period of suspended animation. After the victories of an exuberant and spirited childhood-lived out against the dramatic background of America's participation in World War II-I was to cool down considerably until I went off to college in 1950. There, in a respectable Christian atmosphere hardly less constraining than my own particular Jewish upbringing, but whose strictures I could ignore or oppose without feeling bedeviled by long-standing loyalties, I was able to reactivate a taste for inquiry and speculation that had been all but immobilized during my high school years. From age twelve, when I entered high school, to age sixteen, when I graduated, I was by and large a good, responsible, well-behaved boy, controlled (rather willingly) by the social regulations of the self-conscious and orderly lower-middle-class neighborhood where I had been raised, and mildly constrained still by the taboos that had filtered down to me, in attenuated form, from the religious orthodoxy of my immigrant grandparents. I was probably a "good" adolescent partly because I understood that in our Jewish section of Newark there was nothing much else to be, unless I wanted to steal cars or flunk courses, both of which proved to be beyond me. Rather than bec...

Product details

• Authors: Philip Roth
• Assisted by: Martin Asher (Editor)
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 29.05.2001
• EAN: 9780679749073
• ISBN: 978-0-679-74907-3
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 202 mm x 16 mm
• Series: Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subject: Fiction > Poetry, drama