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Showing 161 - 180 of 7088 items
By Derek C. Maus. 2019
Since the publication of his first novel, The Intuitionist, in 1999, Colson Whitehead (b. 1969) has been considered an important…
new voice in American literature. His seven subsequent books have done little to contradict that initial assessment, especially after 2016’s The Underground Railroad spent many weeks at the top of bestseller lists and won numerous major literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize.Ranging from 2001 to 2016, the twenty-three interviews collected in Conversations with Colson Whitehead reveal the workings of one of America’s most idiosyncratic and most successful literary minds. Through these interviews, it is clear that none of this well-earned praise has gone to his head. If anything, he still seems inclined to present himself as an awkward misfit who writes about such offbeat subject matter as rival groups of elevator inspectors, the insufficiency of off-brand “flesh-colored” bandages, or a literalized alternate version of the Underground Railroad.Whitehead speaks at length about matters related to his craft, including his varied literary and nonliterary influences, the particular methods of researching and writing that have proved valuable to telling his stories, and the ways in which he has managed the rollercoaster life of a professional writer. He also opens up about popular culture, particularly the unconventional blend of music, genre fiction, B movies, and comic books that he gleefully identifies as a passion that has persisted for him since his childhood.By Jackie C. Horne. 2018
Conversations with Madeleine L’Engle is the first collection of interviews with the beloved children’s book author best known for her…
1962 Newbery Award–winning novel, A Wrinkle in Time. However, Madeleine L’Engle's accomplishments as a writer spread far beyond children’s literature. Beginning her career as a literary novelist for adults, L’Engle (1918–2007) continued to write fiction for both young and old long after A Wrinkle in Time. In her sixties, she published personal memoirs and devotional texts that explored her relationship with religion. At the time of her death, L’Engle was mourned by fans of her children’s books and the larger Christian community.L’Engle’s books, as well as her life, were often marked by contradictions. A consummate storyteller, L’Engle carefully crafted and performed a public self-image via her interviews. Weaving through the documentable facts in these interviews are partial lies, misdirections, and wish-fulfillment fantasies. But, when read against her fictions, these “truths” can help us see L’Engle more deeply—what she wanted for herself and for her children, what she believed about good and evil, and what she thought was the right way and the wrong way to be a family—than if she had been able to articulate the truth more directly.The thirteen interviews collected here reveal an amazing feat of authorial self-fashioning, as L’Engle transformed from novelist to children’s author to Christian writer and attempted to craft a public persona that would speak to each of these different audiences in meaningful, yet not painfully revealing, ways.By Tom Head. 2023
When Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) lost the presidency in 1980, it would have been reasonable to think his public life…
was coming to an end. The moderate, evangelical, blue-jeans-wearing peanut farmer made an unlikely governor of Georgia, and an even less likely winner of the vicious 1976 Democratic presidential primary. Coming into an era of American politics where evangelical and rural voters became increasingly identified with the Reagan revolution, and the Democratic Party’s identity became increasingly secular and urban, he did not fit neatly into the political categories of the emerging decade. But it was not politics that would define President Carter in the end: it would be his humble Christian faith and his enduring commitment to the poor, to peace, and to human rights.In Conversations with Jimmy Carter, ten interviews, drawn from Carter’s five decades as a national public figure and author, capture the complexities and contradictions that have defined him—and that have helped to both reflect and shape the highest aspirations of the American experiment.By Jackson R. Bryer, Robert M. Dowling, and Mary C. Hartig. 2021
A prolific playwright, Sam Shepard (1943–2017) wrote fifty-six produced plays, for which he won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize.…
He was also a compelling, Oscar-nominated film actor, appearing in scores of films. Shepard also published eight books of prose and poetry and was a director (directing the premiere productions of ten of his plays as well as two films); a musician (a drummer in three rock bands); a horseman; and a plain-spoken intellectual. The famously private Shepard gave a significant number of interviews over the course of his public life, and the interviewers who respected his boundaries found him to be generous with his time and forthcoming on a wide range of topics. The selected interviews in Conversations with Sam Shepard begin in 1969 when Shepard, already a multiple Obie winner, was twenty-six and end in 2016, eighteen months before his death from complications of ALS at age seventy-three. In the interim, the voice, the writer, and the man evolved, but there are themes that echo throughout these conversations: the indelibility of family; his respect for stage acting versus what he saw as far easier film acting; and the importance of music to his work. He also speaks candidly of his youth in California, his early days as a playwright in New York City, his professionally formative time in London, his interests and influences, the mythology of the American Dream, his own plays, and more. In Conversations with Sam Shepard, the playwright reveals himself in his own words.By Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. Hartig. 2023
With roots in the American South, Beth Henley (b. 1952) has for four decades been a working playwright and screenwriter.…
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 at the age of twenty-eight, Henley so far has written twenty-five produced plays that are always original, usually darkly comic, and often experimental. In these interviews, Henley speaks of the plays, from her early crowd-pleasers, Crimes of the Heart and The Miss Firecracker Contest, to her more experimental plays, including The Debutante Ball and Control Freaks, to her brilliant and time-bending play, The Jacksonian. Henley is a master at writing about the duality of human experience—the beautiful and the grotesque, the cruel and the loving. This duality provokes in Henley both amazement and compassion. She discusses here not only her admiration for Chekhov and other influences, but also her process of bringing a play from notebooks of images and bits of dialogues through rumination, writing, and rewriting to rehearsals and previews. The interviews range from 1981, just before she won the Pulitzer Prize, to 2020 and cover nearly forty years of a creative life, which, as Henley remarks in the most recent interview, is “such a life worth living: to be in tune with the creative process.”By Malcolm Whyte. 2021
Edward Gorey (1925–2000) was a fascinating and prolific author and artist. Of the one hundred delightful and fascinating books that…
Gorey wrote and illustrated, he rarely revealed their specific inspirations or their meanings. Where did his intriguing ideas come from? In Gorey Secrets: Artistic and Literary Inspirations behind Divers Books by Edward Gorey, Malcolm Whyte utilizes years of thorough research to tell an engrossing, revealing story about Gorey’s unique works. Exploring a sampling of Gorey’s eclectic writings, from The Beastly Baby and The Iron Tonic to The Curious Sofa and Dracula, Whyte uncovers influences of Herman Melville, Agatha Christie, Edward Lear, the I Ching, William Hogarth, Rene Magritte, Hokusai, French cinema, early toy books, eighteenth-century religious tracts for children, and much more.With an enlightening preface by Gorey collaborator and scholar Peter F. Neumeyer, Gorey Secrets brings important, uncharted insight into the genius of Edward Gorey and is a welcome addition to collections of both the seasoned Gorey reader and those who are just discovering his captivating books.By Randall Wilhelm and Jesse Graves. 2019
Robert Morgan (b. 1944) is one of the most distinguished writers in southern and Appalachian literature, celebrated for his novels,…
poetry, short fiction, and historical and biographical writing, totaling more than thirty volumes. Morgan’s work gives voice to the traditionally underrepresented people of southern Appalachia, and his appearances in such popular venues as The Oprah Winfrey Show, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, and the New York Times Bestseller List have contributed to his wide readership and successful dismantling of Hollywood stereotypes that still dog the region in the nation’s larger consciousness. His writing makes a case for the dignity of work, the beauty and terror of the landscape, and the essential value of creating a community and learning to live in the world.The interviews in Conversations with Robert Morgan provide readers and scholars the first stand-alone book on Morgan’s long and fascinating career as a master of multiple genres, and make a significant contribution to the understanding of American, southern, and Appalachian literature and culture. Collected here are five decades of interviews that cover such topics as literary influence, the impact of war on family and community, poetic and narrative craft, the role of environmentalism in American literature, and the journey from impoverished North Carolina mountain boy to award-winning Ivy League professor. Morgan is Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1971. Readers will learn about writing across multiple genres, craft that can be learned and practiced by a writer, and studying the past for those present truths that create what Morgan values most in literature, “a community across time.”By John Zheng. 2021
Conversations with Dana Gioia is the first collection of interviews with the internationally known poet and public intellectual, covering every…
stage of his busy, polymathic career. Dana Gioia (b. 1950) has made many contributions to contemporary American literature and culture, including but not limited to crafting a personal poetic style suited to the age; leading the revival of rhyme, meter, and narrative through New Formalism; walloping the “intellectual ghetto” of American poetry through his epochal article “Can Poetry Matter?”; helping American poetry move forward by organizing influential conferences; providing public service and initiating nationwide arts projects such as Poetry Out Loud through his leadership of the National Endowment for the Arts; and editing twenty best-selling literary anthologies widely used in American classrooms. Taken together, the twenty-two collected interviews increase our understanding of Gioia’s poetry and poetics, offer aesthetic pleasure in themselves, and provide a personal encounter with a writer who has made poetry matter. The book presents the actual voice of Dana Gioia, who speaks of his personal and creative life and articulates his unique vision of American culture and poetry.By Will Brantley. 2024
The twenty-four interviews collected in Conversations with Sarah Schulman, roughly a fifth of those that exist, have enabled Schulman to…
expound upon her distinctive fusion of art and social commitment. Ranging from major forums to smaller venues, and covering a period of more than thirty years, these interviews provide full evidence of Schulman’s value as a pivotal player in the intellectual life of her time. Schulman’s career as a writer, activist, teacher, and oral historian is now in its fifth decade. Spanning multiple fiction genres, her eleven novels include After Delores (1988), Rat Bohemia (1995), The Child (2007), and Maggie Terry (2018). A native New Yorker, Schulman (b. 1958) writes for the people that she writes about—women and men making the most of a society that seems continually marked by homophobia, which Schulman regards as less a phobia than an unacknowledged pleasure system. Readers have come to relish Schulman’s provocations, nowhere more so than through her books of nonfiction on topics such as gentrification and the interlocking nature of conflict and abuse. And since the early 1980s, when Schulman worked as a journalist, readers have come to applaud her searing indictments of the nation’s woeful response to its AIDS crisis. Schulman has received the Kessler Award from CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies in honor of her body of work that has influenced the field of gay and lesbian studies, as well as the Bill Whitehead Award from Publishing Triangle for lifetime achievement. She holds an endowed chair in creative writing at Northwestern University.By Earl G. Ingersoll and John Cusatis. 2020
John Banville (b. 1945) is a distinguished novelist and winner of several prestigious awards, including the Man Booker Prize for…
his novel The Sea. As a teenager Banville hoped to be a painter, and although he ultimately decided he lacked the talent for it, his passion for painting continues to influence and inform his work. Banville conceives the novel as a work of art aimed not at the present, but for the ages. He aspires to create narratives that offer readers a sense of what it is to be conscious, human, and feeling, and aims to convey his conviction that “the familiar is always unfamiliar, the ordinary extraordinary.” Conversations with John Banville is the first interview collection with this esteemed writer and includes eighteen interviews that reflect on nearly five decades of work, from his first book, Long Lankin, to his novel Mrs. Osmond and memoir, Time Pieces. The collection also includes discussions about—and with, in the case of James Gleick’s 2014 interview—Banville’s alter ego, Benjamin Black, who writes crime novels. Highly engaging and insightful, Banville’s interviews offer a variety of writerly autobiography regarding what he has aimed to do in his work and how he continues to pursue perfection, which he has known from the beginning must be impossible.By Donald P. Kaczvinsky. 2020
Conversations with Graham Swift is the first collection of interviews conducted with the author of the Booker Prize–winning novel Last…
Orders. Beginning in 1985 with Swift’s arrival in New York to promote Waterland and concluding with an interview from 2016 that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, the collection spans Swift’s more than thirty-five-year career as a writer. The volume also includes interviews first printed in English as well as translated from the French or Spanish and covers a wide range of formats, from lengthier interviews published in standard academic journals, to those for radio, newspapers, and, more recently, podcasts. In these interviews, Graham Swift (b. 1949) offers insights into his life and career, including his friendships with other contemporary writers like Ted Hughes and the group of celebrated novelists who emerged in Britain during the eighties. With remarkable clarity, Swift discusses the themes of his novels and short stories: death, love, history, parent-child relationships, the power of the imagination, the role of storytelling, and the consequences of knowing. He also notes the influences, literary and personal, that have helped shape his writing career. While quite ordinary in his life and daily habits, Swift reveals his penetrating intellect and rich imagination—an imagination that can craft some of the most engaging and formally complex stories in the language.By Michael Lackey. 2020
Joanna Scott (b. 1960) has been one of America’s leading writers since the 1990s. Both critically acclaimed and winner of…
numerous prestigious awards, Scott’s unique and probing vision and masterful writing has inspired readers to adjust their perceptions of life and of themselves. Her fiction jolts and illuminates, frequently exposing the degree to which the perverse is natural and the ordinary is twisted and demented. Conversations with Joanna Scott presents eighteen interviews that span two decades and are as much about the process of reading as they are about writing. Witty, probing, wide-ranging, and insightful, Scott’s off-the-cuff observations about literature and life are as thought-provoking as some of the most memorable lines and scenes in her fiction. Not only shedding new light on Scott’s fiction, Conversations with Joanna Scott also illuminates enduring areas of inquiry, like the challenge of trying to make art out of sentences; the effort to recover and imagine lost stories from the past; the changing status of the literary imagination; fictional portraiture and the productive possibilities that come from blending biography and fiction; and concerns about literacy.Joanna Scott has made her name through brilliant, award-winning novels, but this volume clarifies why she is also one of America’s leading public intellectuals and an astute critic of literature and culture.By David Rae Morris, Willie Morris. 2022
Winner of the 2023 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letter Award for PhotographyLove, Daddy: Letters from My Father examines the…
complexities of father-and-son relationships through letters and photographs. Willie Morris wrote scores of letters to his only son, David Rae Morris, from the mid-1970s until Willie’s death in 1999. From David Rae’s perspective, his father was often emotionally disconnected and lived a peculiar lifestyle, often staying out carousing well into the night. But Willie was an eloquent and accomplished writer and began to write his son long, loving, and supportive letters when David Rae was still in high school. An aspiring photographer, David Rae was confused and befuddled by his father’s warring personalities and began photographing Willie using the camera as a buffer to protect him and his emotions. The collection begins in early 1976 and continues for more than twenty years as David Rae moved about the country, living in New York, Massachusetts, Texas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Minnesota, before finally settling in Louisiana. “All the while my father was writing to me I somehow managed to save his letters,” David Rae writes. “I left them in storage and in boxes and in piles of clutter on desks and in basements. They were kind, offering a love that he found difficult to express openly and directly. He simply was more comfortable communicating through letters.” The letters cover topics ranging from writing, the weather, Willie’s return to Mississippi in 1980, the Ole Miss football season, and local town gossip to the fleas on the dog to just life and how it’s lived. Likewise, the photographs are portraits, documentary images of daily life, dinners, outings, and private moments. Together they narrate and illuminate the complexities of one family relationship, and how, for better or worse, that love endures the passage of time.By Daria Tunca. 2020
Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (b. 1977) is undoubtedly one of the most widely acclaimed African writers of the twenty-first…
century. Best known for her insightful fiction, viral TED talks, and essays on feminism, she is also an outspoken intellectual. As she puts it in an interview with Lia Grainger, in her characteristically straightforward style: “I have things to say and I’ll say them.”Conversations with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the first collection of interviews with the writer. Covering fifteen years of conversations, the interviews start with the publication of Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), and end in late 2018, by which time Adichie had become one of the most prominent figures on the international literary scene. As both scholars and passionate readers of the author’s work are bound to find out, the opinions shared by Adichie in interviews over the years coalesce into a fascinating portrait that presents both abiding features and gradual transformations.Reflecting the political and emotional scope of Adichie’s work, the conversations contained in this volume cover a wide range of topics, including colonialism, race, immigration, and feminism. Collectively, these interviews testify both to the author’s ardent wish to strive for a more just and equal world, and to her deep interest in exploring our common humanity. As Adichie says in her 2009 interview with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro: “When people call me a novelist, I say, well, yes. I really think of myself as a storyteller.” This book invites Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to tell her own literary story.By Mollie Godfrey. 2021
Honorable Mention Recipient of the Modern Language Association Prize for Collaborative, Bibliographical, or Archival ScholarshipSpanning from the debut of A…
Raisin in the Sun on Broadway in 1959 to her early death from cancer in January 1965, Lorraine Hansberry’s short stint in the public eye changed the landscape of American theater. With A Raisin in the Sun, Hansberry (1930–1965) became both the first African American woman to have a play produced on Broadway and the first to win the prestigious New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. Resonating deeply with the aims of the civil rights movement, Raisin also ushered in a new era of Black representation on the stage and screen, displacing the cartoonish stereotypes that were the remnants of blackface minstrelsy in favor of complex three-dimensional portrayals of Black characters and Black life. Hansberry’s public discourse in the aftermath of Raisin’s success also disrupted mainstream critical tendencies to diminish the work of Black artists, helping pave the way for future work by Black playwrights. Conversations with Lorraine Hansberry is the first volume to collect all of her substantive interviews in one place, including many radio and television interviews that have never before appeared in print. The twenty-one pieces collected here—ranging from just before the Broadway premiere of A Raisin in the Sun to less than six months before Hansberry’s death—offer an incredible window into Hansberry’s aesthetic and political thought. In these conversations, Hansberry explores many of the questions most often put to Black writers of the mid-twentieth century—including everything from her thinking about the relationship between art and protest, universality and particularity, and realism and naturalism, to her sense of the relationship between Black intellectuals and the Black masses, integration and Black Nationalism, and African American and Pan-African liberation. Taken together, these interviews reveal the insight, intensity, and eloquence that made Hansberry such a transformative figure in American letters.By Carl Rollyson. 2022
William Faulkner has been the topic of numerous biographies, papers, and international attention. Yet there are no collected resources providing…
a comprehensive scope of Faulkner’s life and work before now. William Faulkner Day by Day provides unique insight into the daily life of one of America’s favorite writers. Beyond biography, this book is an effort to recover the diurnal Faulkner, to write in the present tense about past events as if they are happening now. More importantly, this book is concerned with more than the writer’s life. Instead, it examines the whole man—the daily, mundane, profound, life changing, and everything in between. Spanning from the 1825 birth of Faulkner’s great-grandfather to Faulkner’s death 137 years later to the day, author and biographer Carl Rollyson presents for the first time a complete portrait of Faulkner’s life untethered from any one biographical or critical narrative. Presented as a chronology of events without comment, this book is accompanied by an extensive list of principal personages and is supported by extensive archival research and interviews. Populated by the characters of Faulkner’s life—including family and friends both little known and internationally famous—this book is for Faulkner readers of all kinds with a wide variety of interests in the man and his work.By Michael O’Connell. 2022
Besides being one of America’s most celebrated living authors, George Saunders (b. 1958) is also an excellent interview subject. In…
the fourteen interviews included in Conversations with George Saunders, covering nearly twenty years of his career, the Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December provides detailed insight into his own writing process and craft, alongside nuanced interpretations of his own work. He also delves into aspects of his biography, including anecdotes from his childhood and his experiences as both a student and teacher in MFA programs, as well as reflections on how parenthood affected his writing, the role of religious belief and practice in his work, and how he has dealt with his growing popularity and fame. Throughout this collection, we see him in conversation with former students, fellow writers, mainstream critics, and literary scholars. In each instance, Saunders is eager to engage in meaningful dialogue about what he calls the “big questions of our age.” In a number of interviews, he reflects on the moral and ethical responsibility of fiction, as well as how his work engages with issues of social and political commentary. But at the same time, these interviews, like all of Saunders’s best work, are funny, warm, surprising, and wise. Saunders says he has “always enjoyed doing interviews” in part because he views “intense, respectful conversation [as], really, an artform—an exploration of sorts.” Readers of this volume will have the pleasure of joining him in this process of exploration.By David Stephen Calonne. 2019
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) was one of the most famous American poets of the twentieth century. Yet, his career is distinguished…
by not only his strong contributions to literature but also social justice. Conversations with Allen Ginsberg collects interviews from 1962 to 1997 that chart Ginsberg’s intellectual, spiritual, and political evolution.Ginsberg’s mother, Naomi, was afflicted by mental illness, and Ginsberg’s childhood was marked by his difficult relationship with her; however, he also gained from her a sense of the necessity to fight against social injustice that would mark his political commitments. While a student at Columbia University, Ginsberg would meet Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Gregory Corso, and the Beat Generation was born. Ginsberg researched deeply the social issues he cared about, and this becomes clear with each interview. Ginsberg discusses all manner of topics including censorship laws, the legalization of marijuana, and gay rights. A particularly interesting aspect of the book is the inclusion of interviews that explore Ginsberg’s interests in Buddhist philosophy and his intensive reading in a variety of spiritual traditions. Conversations with Allen Ginsberg also explores the poet’s relationship with Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and the final interviews concentrate on his various musical projects involving the adapting of poems by William Blake as well as settings of his own poetry. This is an essential collection for all those interested in Beat literature and twentieth-century American culture.By Daniel Lukes. 2020
Across fiction, journalism, ethnography, and history, William T. Vollmann’s oeuvre—which includes a “prostitution trilogy,” a septology (Seven Dreams) about encounters…
between first North Americans and European colonists, and a more-than-three-thousand-page philosophical treatise on violence—is as ambitious as it is dazzling. Conversations with William T. Vollmann collects twenty-nine interviews, from early press coverage in Britain where his career first took flight, to in-depth visits to his writing and art studio in Sacramento, California. Throughout these conversations, Vollmann (b. 1959) speaks with candor and wit on such subjects as grief and guilt in his work, his love of guns and his experience of war, the responsibilities of the artist as witness, the benefits of looking out into the world beyond the confines of one’s horizon, the limitations of what literature can achieve, and how we can speak to the future. Bringing to the fore several expanded, unpublished, and hard-to-find interviews, this volume offers a valuable set of perspectives on a uniquely rewarding and sometimes overwhelming writer. On the road promoting his books or in a domestic setting, Vollmann comes across as reflective and humane, humble in his craft despite deep dedication to his uncompromising vision, and ever armed with a spirit of mischief and capacity to shock and unsettle the reader.By Jackson R. Bryer and Ben Siegel. 2019
Neil Simon (1927–2018) began as a writer for some of the leading comedians of the day—including Jackie Gleason, Red Buttons,…
Phil Silvers, and Jerry Lewis—and he wrote for fabled television programs alongside a group of writers that included Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Michael Stewart, and Sid Caesar. After television, Simon embarked on a playwriting career. In the next four decades he saw twenty-eight of his plays and five musicals produced on Broadway. Thirteen of those plays and three of the musicals ran for more than five hundred performances. He was even more widely known for his screenplays—some twenty-five in all. Yet, despite this success, it was not until his BB Trilogy—Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound—that critics and scholars began to take Simon seriously as a literary figure. This change in perspective culminated in 1991 when his play Lost in Yonkers won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In the twenty-two interviews included in Conversations with Neil Simon, Simon talks candidly about what it was like to write commercially successful plays that were dismissed by critics and scholars. He also speaks at length about the differences between writing for television, for the stage, and for film. He speaks openly and often revealingly about his relationships with, among many others, Mike Nichols, Walter Matthau, Sid Caesar, and Jack Lemmon. Above all, these interviews reveal Neil Simon as a writer who thought long and intelligently about creating for stage, film, and television, and about dealing with serious subjects in a comic mode. In so doing, Conversations with Neil Simon compels us to recognize Neil Simon’s genius.