A Picador Paperback Original 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," toJoan 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 recognized as classic works of literature, an essential and definitive record of the writing life. They have won the coveted George Polk Award and have been a contender for the Pulitzer Prize. 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 indispensable book for all writers and readers.

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 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.

Introduction

vii

Philip Gourevitch

Dorothy Parker (1956)

(16)

Truman Capote (1957)

(17)

Ernest Hemingway (1958)

(28)

T. S. Eliot (1959)

(24)

Saul Bellow (1966)

(25)

Jorge Luis Borges (1967)

111

(49)

Kurt Vonnegut (1977)

160

(46)

James M. Cain (1978)

206

(22)

Rebecca West (1981)

228

(47)

Elizabeth Bishop (1981)

275

(28)

Robert Stone (1985)

303

(33)

Robert Gottlieb (1994)

336

(40)

Richard Price (1996)

376

(36)

Billy Wilder (1996)

412

(24)

Jack Gilbert (2005)

436

(37)

Joan Didion (2006)

473

(28)

Contributors

501

(8)

Acknowledgments

509

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The Paris Review Interviews, I

9780312361754

0312361750

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Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

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