Description
Very Good+ dust jacket, a mylar dust jacket has been added, red and white lettering on front and spine. The Very Good+ binding is green cloth over boards, initial PR in gilt in lower corner, Gilt lettering on spine. Slight aging to page edges, does not affect text. The binding is tight and pages are clean. The book measures 8.5″ tall x 5.8″ wide.
About the book (from the dust jacket)
While he was writing and publishing the eight books of fiction on which his reputation is based, Philip Roth also published a number of pieces-articles, essays, interviews-more than twenty of which appear in Reading Myself and Others, his first collection of non-fiction.
As the title suggests, much of this book is Roth on Roth-in effect, chapters in the autobiography of the writer. He describes here, as he puts it, “what I think has generated my work, the means employed from book to book, and the models with which I associate my efforts.” Pieces devoted to each of the five most recent novels (Portnoy’s Complaint, Our Gang, The Breast, The Great American Novel, My Life as a Man) are accompanied by essays on the interests, impulses, and experiences that have shaped all of his work from the beginning. These interviews and articles relate the varied surfaces of his fiction to his underlying preoccupations.
Roth’s fiction has engendered controversy from the start. Over the years, he has at times resisted the inclination to let the work speak for itself, particularly when such controversy enabled him to speculate on larger literary, moral, and social issues. These critical pieces are here as well.
The well-known essay “Writing American Fiction, written as the sixties began, with considerable prescience took up the problem that the increasing grotesqueness of American life posed for novelists-a problem that Roth and others had to respond to. Some of these others are “read” in this book: Bellow, Malamud, and Mailer, such younger writers (continued from front flap, as Fredrica Wagman and Alan Lelchuk, and the Czech writer Milan Kundera, whose work receives an appreciative introduction In a final piece, half essay, half story, entitled “I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting`; or, Looking at Kafka,” Roth intriguingly explores some of the themes of the book what he calls “the relationship between the written and the unwritten world,” the connection between what is imagined and what is “out there,” between what a writer intends and what manifests itself in his work. And finally, between the work and the uses to which it is put by readers, critics, and the media.
Readers of Philip Roth’s stories and novels will not be surprised to find this book provocative and entertaining. Above all, however, it reveals a concern, dating from the beginning of his career, with the issues that have been raised by his work.
