Product Description

How do great writers do it? From James M Cain's hard-nosed observation that "writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational," to Joan Didion's account of how she composes a book - "I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm." - "The Paris Review" has elicited some of the most revelatory and revealing thoughts from the literary masters of our age. For more than half a century, the magazine has spoken with most of our leading novelists, poets and playwrights, and the interviews themselves have come to be recognised as classic works of literature, an essential and definitive record of the writing life. Now, Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch introduces an entirely original selection of sixteen of the most celebrated interviews. Often startling, always engaging, these encounters contain an immense scope of intelligence, personality, experience and wit from the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Rebecca West and Billy Wilder. This is an indispensible book for all writers and readers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18105 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Review
"The Paris Review is one of the few truly essential literary magazines of the twentieth century--and now of the twenty-first. Frequently weird, always wonderful." Margaret Atwood "I have all the copies of the Review and like the interviews very much. They will make a good book when collected and that will be very good for the Review." Ernest Hemingway "I have been fascinated by the Paris Review interviews for as long as I can remember. Taken together, they form perhaps the finest available inquiry into the 'how' of literature, in many ways a more interesting question than the 'why." Salman Rushdie"

About the Author
From the treasure trove of the archives, The Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch has selected twenty of the most essential interviews for the first of a three volume set. Here are Ernest Hemmingway, Truman Capote, Elizabeth Bishop, and many other novelists, poets, playwrights, memoirists speaking for the ages, with surprising candour, about all that matters most to them.

Customer Reviews

Not perfect, but highly recommended.
I'm hooked. At its best , this is a fantastic resource for aspiring writers. The book consists of 16 Q and A interviews (well, one of them doesn't strictly speaking follow that format) with authors of fiction (10), poetry (3), non-fiction (1), and screenplays (1) and one editor. The strongest and weakest examples are both from people I had not heard of before. The Rebecca West interview was long, uninformative about the craft and just dull. It should never have been published, let alone collected as one of "the best Paris Review interviews".

The strongest (and the one that moved away from the normal Q and A format) was from editor Robert Gottlieb. It included contributions from authors he had edited, such as LeCarre, Lessing, Morrison and Caro, (as well as an agent and one of his assistant editors during his stint as editor of the New Yorker) to which he added his thoughts about editing. It is fascinating about writing in general, the impact of editors and the sometimes tempestuous relationship between authors and editors.

Other highlights were Truman Capote, Billy Wilder, Kurt Vonnegut and, surprisingly for me given my relative lack of interest in reading or writing poetry, all three poet interviews (T S Elliott, Elizabeth Bishop and Jack Gilbert).

Can't wait for volumes two and three.

Truly Enlightening
Goodness me. I have never had such value for money. This a truly erudite, careful and candid masterpiece of journalism. The absolute standouts are the Robert Gottlieb chapter which is like an autopsy on writing itself. Borges is an impish delight, Hemmingway a prickly macho man-child, Parker weary of her wit (a devil sick of sin indeed)and Vonnegut human and warm. Saul Bellow left me cold, too prim, but page for page this volume is worth every penny. Buy. Buy buy buy!

Endlessly fascinating and hugely entertaining
I'm relatively new to the Paris Review (which was founded back in 1953) but I am now a complete convert having read this first volume of interviews cover to cover and having started to read the magazine itself.
The Writers at Work interviews have been described as being the DNA of literature and I think this is an apt description. No one who is interested in the creative process of writing or in any of the 16 writers in this diverse collection (from Borges to Didion to Eliot to Bellow to Rebecca West to Bill Wilder to Capote to Vonnegut) could fail to be enthralled by this book. It really does reveal the true art of the interview, a skill that seems to have been pretty much lost if our contemporary magazines and newspapers are anything to go by. These are genuinely in depth and are intimate in a way that is rare but highly revealing. I would urge you to buy this book.