Philip Roth: Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960-2014

Description

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 - this retrospective summation of his essays and interviews shows at every turn the vigour, acuity, and persuasive power of our most celebrated living novelist.

In 1997 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 has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. 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.

"Our hero continues his great and devouring argument with life, exhibiting a tremendous generosity of spirit towards other voyagers in literature and a magnificent defiance of the prohibition that an artist shouldn't intellectualize and defend his own work it in the public arena. At a time when we seem to be questioning every verity, Why Write? is essential reading." -- Jonathan Lethem "Why Write? is a page-turning classic, a cover-to-cover joy, a party in your head. Its sustained cry against tyranny in all its forms is required reading for this or any age." -- Mary Karr "Consistently intelligent and entertaining." --James Campbell, The Wall Street Journal "At a time of renewed sensitivity to questions of cultural identity, the biographical fallacy has returned in full force. Readers and critics, distraught at the nihilism of the current political nightmare, have sought comfort in fiction that affirms their principles and beliefs, fiction in which victimized peoples rise triumphant. . . . But we should hope for something more. We should hope for new Philip Roths." --Nathaniel Rich, The New York Review of Books