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Other titles in the Paris Review Interviews series:The Paris Review Interviews, Iby The Paris Review and Philip Gourevitch
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The Paris Review has introduced the important writers of the day. Adrienne Rich was first published in its pages, as were Philip Roth, V. S. Naipaul, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Mona Simpson, Edward P. Jones, and Rick Moody. In addition to the focus on original creative work, The Paris Review's Writers at Work interview series offers authors a rare opportunity to discuss their life and art at length. Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:From William Faulkner's famous reply, "The writer's only responsibility is to his art," to James Salter's confession — "What is the ultimate impulse to write? Because all this is going to vanish" — The Paris Review has elicited many of the most arresting, illuminating, and revealing discussions of life and craft from the greatest writers of our age. Under its original editor, George Plimpton, The Paris Review is credited with inventing the modern literary interview, and more than half a century later the magazine remains the master of the form. By turns intimate, instructive, gossipy, curmudgeonly, elegant, hilarious, cunning, and consoling, The Paris Review interviews have come to be celebrated as classic literary works in their own right. Now, from the treasure trove of the archives, 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 candor, about all that matters most to them. Review:"You won't be able to get their rueful, witty, snappish, and thoughtful voices out of your head...these sixteen exceptional slices of literary history belong in the form the interviewees devoted their lives to, namely a finely made book, always at hand, always compelling." Booklist Review:"Read The Paris Review Interviews, I, not only to learn something about writing from the 16 authors questioned but also for Ernest Hemingway's satisfying dismissals of interviewer George Plimpton: 'The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized severely.'" Esquire Review:"The Paris Review Interviews, I, the first of three collections to be culled from more than 50 years of this premier literary journal's quarterly offerings, presents a set of groundbreaking, eclectic, indispensable Q&As with such masters as Elizabeth Bishop, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, and Joan Didion..." Elle Review:"At their best, the Paris Review interviews remove the veils of literary personae to reveal the flesh-and-blood writer at the source. By exposing the inner workings of writing, they place the reader in the driver's seat of literature." Billy Collins Review:"The Paris Review interviews are objects of wonder that formed my first and fiercest impression of what it was to be an author. I still ascribe any vivid remembered quote to their pages, even when it didn't appear there." Jonathan Lethem Review:"The Paris Review interviews have the best questions, the best answers, and are, hands down, the best way to steal a look into the minds of the best writers (and interviewers) in the world. Reading them together is like getting an fabulous guided tour through literary life." Susan Orlean Review:"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 Review:"A colossal literary event — worth the price of admission for the Borges interview alone, and of course the Billy Wilder, and the Vonnegut, and and and and....Just buy this book and read it all." Gary Shteyngart Review:"There are so many potential points of entry to The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1 — this jewel box of a collection of in-depth chats on the craft of writing—that one hardly knows where to begin.... [The] candid comments... are well worth the price of admission.... [An] indispensable collection." San Francisco Chronicle Review:"We're holding out for a guy who has The Paris Review Interviewson his bookshelf. The revered literary journal showcases its best interviews with some of the most talented writers ever, from Joan Didion and Truman Capote to Dorothy Parker and Kurt Vonnegut — perfect if you’re a writer or a wannabe, or if you just feel the need to redeem yourself for all those nights spent watching The Hills." Jane Review:"Utterly absorbing.... They are all fascinating and often quite funny.”" Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe Synopsis:A Picador Paperback Original
The Paris Review was founded in 1953 and has published early and important work by Philip Roth, V. S. Naipaul, Jeffrey Eugenides, A. S. Byatt, T. C. Boyle, William T. Vollmann, and many other great writers of the past half century. Some of the magazine's greatest hits have been collected in The Paris Review Book of People with Problems as well as The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms and The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, the Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953.
Philip Gourevitch is the editor of The Paris Review, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and the author of A Cold Case and We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year 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 become works of literature, records of the writing life. They have won the George Polk Award and have been a contender for the Pulitzer Prize. Now, Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch introduces a selection of sixteen of the most celebrated interviews. 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. "The most remarkable and extensive interviewing project we possess . . . For 50 years The Paris Review has been talking to writers, in one long session, or several sessions, or recurring sessions spaced years apart . . . The Paris Review Interviews, I is a series of excursions, alternately purposeful and capricious, with side trips, stops for tea and mystifications . . . We end up knowing them not as subjects but as fellow day-trippers, and it is they, not the interviewer, who lead the trip."Richard Eder, The New York Times "The Paris Review Interviews . . . is a small treasure. The interviews are literary landmarks, and the gossip, humor, ideas and practical advice dispensed are bracing. Each of these conversations . . . are carefully crafted and bring with them something of the heft of literature."Oscar Villalon, San Francisco Chronicle "There are so many potential points of entry to The Paris Review Interviews, vol. Ithis jewel box of a collection of in-depth chats on the craft of writingthat one hardly knows where to begin. . . . [The] candid comments . . . are well worth the price of admission. . . . [An] indispensable collection."San Francisco Chronicle
"Utterly absorbing. . . . They are all fascinating and often quite funny."Katherine A. Powers, The Boston Globe
"The finest series of interviews with anyone published in Americanot just irresistible to anyone interested in literature but anyone who responds at all to the Art of the Interview. . . . So many of these are classics of their kind. . . . As the saying goes, they're full of pith and vinegar - funny, profound and poetic and fundamentally unlike any attempted replication elsewhere."Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News (Editors Choice) "For bibliophiles, a glimpse into Ernest Hemingway's work space (the corner of a bedroom in a Havana house), which he offered The Paris Review's George Plimpton, is akin to the Virgin Mary opening up her home in Bethlehem to Cribs. Since its inception in 1953 on a Left Bank barge, The Paris Review has remained a handbook to the literati, and its extensive author interviews are as storied as the magazine itself: Q&A's drawn from a sit-down and correspondence, and, in an unprecedented move, returned to the subject for review and expansiona format much copied today, from The Believer to Playboy. They've finally been collected in The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I . . . Here, Hemingway talks horseracing; Dorothy Parker reveals a predilection for choosing character names from the phone book and obituaries; and Saul Bellow can't escape the chaos of modern city lifejust a few of many insights gleaned from the most influential writers of the 20th century."Seattle Weekly "The unguarded moment . . . that's the holy grail for any interviewer trying to discover what makes a writer tick. The Paris Review has a long history of delivering such moments in the author interviews it has conducted over the past half century."Michael Upchurch, The Seattle Times "As The Paris Review Interviews reveals, there is an art to the interview and a value to what it brings. The Review's interview series . . . serves as a kind of public record. . . . In the best interviews, the exchange of question and answer brings the authors to life, as if their voices had been recorded."The Wall Street Journal "The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I is the sort of book that makes one anticipate an evening in a comfy chair with a good glass of wine within easy reach."The Tampa Tribune "[Read] The Paris Review Interviews I< Synopsis:By turns intimate, instructive, gossipy, curmudgeonly, elegant, hilarious, cunning, and consoling, the "Paris Review" interviews have come to be celebrated as classic literary works in their own right. Now, from the treasure trove of the archives, editor Philip Gourevitch has selected 20 of the most essential interviews for the first of a three volume set. 448 p.
About the AuthorThe Paris Review was founded in 1953 and has published early and important work by Philip Roth, V. S. Naipaul, Jeffrey Eugenides, A. S. Byatt, T. C. Boyle, William T. Vollmann, and many other writers who have given us the great literature of the past half century. Some of the magazine's greatest hits have been collected by Picador in The Paris Review Book of People with Problems as well as The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms and The Paris Review Book of Heartbreak, Madness, Sex, Love, Betrayal, Outsiders, Intoxication, War, Whimsy, Horrors, God, Death, Dinner, Baseball, Travels, the Art of Writing, and Everything Else in the World Since 1953.
Philip Gourevitch is the editor of The Paris Review, a staff writer for The New Yorker, and the author of A Cold Case and We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Table of ContentsIntroduction by Philip Gourevitch Dorothy Parker (1956) Truman Capote (1957) Ernest Hemingway (1958) T. S. Eliot (1959) Saul Bellow (1966) Jorge Luis Borges (1967) Kurt Vonnegut (1977) James M. Cain (1978) Rebecca West (1981) Elizabeth Bishop (1981) Robert Stone (1985) Robert Gottlieb (1994) Richard Price (1996) Billy Wilder (1996) Jack Gilbert (2005) Joan Didion (2006) Contributors Acknowledgments
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