Shop Talk 2001

Where to read

“ON THE FRIDAY in September 1986 that I arrived in Turin to renew a conversation with Primo Levi that we had begun one afternoon in London the spring before, I asked to be shown around the paint factory where he'd been employed as a research chemist and, afterward, until retirement, as manager.”

Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of Jewish and American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection *Goodbye, Columbus,* which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller *Portnoy's Complaint.* Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictio