The Paris Review Interviews: v. 1

by Philip Gourevitch (Introduction)

• New

  Paperback
  2007

  $14.57

  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 four volume set. The authors are: Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, Saul Bellow, Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, James M. Cain, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Stone, Robert Gottlieb, Richard Price, Billy Wilder, Jack Gilbert and Joan Didion.

• New

  Paperback
  2007

  $14.57

  A second volume of fascinating interviews from one of the world's best loved literary magazines Since The Paris Review was founded in 1953, it has given us invaluable conversations with the greatest writers of our age, vivid self-portraits that are themselves works of finely-crafted literature. From Faulkner's determination that a great novel takes 'ninety-nine percent talent ...ninety-nine percent discipline ...ninety-nine percent work', to Gabriel Marquez's observation that 'in the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book', The Paris Review has elicited revelatory and revealing thoughts from our most accomplished novelists, poets and playwrights. With an introduction by Orhan Pamuk, this volume brings together another rich, varied crop of literary voices, comprising: Graham Greene, James Thurber, William Faulkner, Robert Lowell, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Eudora Welty, John Gardner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Philip Larkin, James Baldwin, William Gaddis, Harold Bloom, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Peter Carey and Stephen King. 'A colossal literary event' as Gary Shteyngart put it, The Paris Review Interviews vol. 2 is a treasury of wisdom from the world's literary masters.