Reading Myself and Others

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 . Author In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain , concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six years "for the entire work of the recipient."

"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