What do you think?
Rate this book
The Paris Review Interviews, IV
For more than fifty years, The Paris Review has brought us revelatory and revealing interviews with the literary lights of our age.
This critically acclaimed series continues with another eclectic lineup, including Philip Roth, Ezra Pound, Haruki Murakami, Marilynne Robinson, Stephen Sondheim, E. B. White, Maya Angelou, William Styron and more. In each of these remarkable extended conversations, the authors touch every corner of the writing life, sharing their ambitions, obsessions, inspirations, disappointments, and the most idiosyncratic details of their writing habits.
The collected interviews of The Paris Reviews are, as Gary Shteyngart put it, "a colossal literary event."
This critically acclaimed series continues with another eclectic lineup, including Philip Roth, Ezra Pound, Haruki Murakami, Marilynne Robinson, Stephen Sondheim, E. B. White, Maya Angelou, William Styron and more. In each of these remarkable extended conversations, the authors touch every corner of the writing life, sharing their ambitions, obsessions, inspirations, disappointments, and the most idiosyncratic details of their writing habits.
The collected interviews of The Paris Reviews are, as Gary Shteyngart put it, "a colossal literary event."
478 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
67 people are currently reading
841 people want to read
About the author
The Paris Review
119 books305 followersFounded in Paris by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton in 1953, The Paris Review began with a simple editorial mission: “Dear reader,” William Styron wrote in a letter in the inaugural issue, “The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines and putting it pretty much where it belongs, i.e., somewhere near the back of the book. I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they're good.”
Decade after decade, the 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. Selections from Samuel Beckett's novel Molloy appeared in the fifth issue, one of his first publications in English. The magazine was also among the first to recognize the work of Jack Kerouac, with the publication of his short story, “The Mexican Girl,” in 1955. Other milestones of contemporary literature, now widely anthologized, also first made their appearance in The Paris Review: Italo Calvino's Last Comes the Raven, Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus, Donald Barthelme's Alice, Jim Carroll's Basketball Diaries, Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Virgin Suicides, and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.
In addition to the focus on original creative work, the founding editors found another alternative to criticism—letting the authors talk about their work themselves. The Review’s Writers at Work interview series offers authors a rare opportunity to discuss their life and art at length; they have responded with some of the most revealing self-portraits in literature. Among the interviewees are William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Joan Didion, Seamus Heaney, Ian McEwan, and Lorrie Moore. In the words of one critic, it is “one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world.”
Decade after decade, the 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. Selections from Samuel Beckett's novel Molloy appeared in the fifth issue, one of his first publications in English. The magazine was also among the first to recognize the work of Jack Kerouac, with the publication of his short story, “The Mexican Girl,” in 1955. Other milestones of contemporary literature, now widely anthologized, also first made their appearance in The Paris Review: Italo Calvino's Last Comes the Raven, Philip Roth's Goodbye Columbus, Donald Barthelme's Alice, Jim Carroll's Basketball Diaries, Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Virgin Suicides, and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections.
In addition to the focus on original creative work, the founding editors found another alternative to criticism—letting the authors talk about their work themselves. The Review’s Writers at Work interview series offers authors a rare opportunity to discuss their life and art at length; they have responded with some of the most revealing self-portraits in literature. Among the interviewees are William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Joan Didion, Seamus Heaney, Ian McEwan, and Lorrie Moore. In the words of one critic, it is “one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world.”
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
June 28, 2018
"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads."
William Styron introduces the fourth and final volume of the interviews; an eminently satisfactory and solid selection to finish off the collection. Kerouac is here, and V.S. Naipaul, eccentric characters both. E.B. White, as grounding a literary presence as might be wished for, surprises all in admitting he's not much for reading. He prefers, by far, going outside to see what Nature is up to. There's a wonderful piece submitted by James Lipton; an extract of his interview with Stephen Sondheim. Haruki Murakami actually bristles on occasion, especially with regard to his placement in the pantheon of Japanese literature. But the author who had me sitting up to take note, and whom it's clear I must read at some point, is Paul Auster. The manner in which he expresses his experience of the mid-life conflict...so simply put, so purely felt...is well worth quoting here:
"I'm well into my fifties now and things change for you as you get older. Time begins slipping away, and simple arithmetic tells you there are more years behind you than ahead of you - many more. Your body starts breaking down, you have aches and pains that weren't there before, and little by little the people you love begin to die. By the age of fifty, most of us are haunted by ghosts. They live inside us and we spend as much time talking to the dead as to the living. It's hard for a young person to understand this. It's not that a twenty year old doesn't know he's going to die, but it's the loss of others that so profoundly affects an older person - you can't know what that accumulation of losses is going to do to you until you experience it yourself. Life is so short, so fragile, so mystifying. After all, how many people do we actually love in a lifetime? Just a few, a tiny few. When most of them are gone, the map of your inner world changes. As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy."
This four-part collection has its ups and downs in terms of focus and substance, but on the whole I found it fascinating as a record of artistic thought.
William Styron introduces the fourth and final volume of the interviews; an eminently satisfactory and solid selection to finish off the collection. Kerouac is here, and V.S. Naipaul, eccentric characters both. E.B. White, as grounding a literary presence as might be wished for, surprises all in admitting he's not much for reading. He prefers, by far, going outside to see what Nature is up to. There's a wonderful piece submitted by James Lipton; an extract of his interview with Stephen Sondheim. Haruki Murakami actually bristles on occasion, especially with regard to his placement in the pantheon of Japanese literature. But the author who had me sitting up to take note, and whom it's clear I must read at some point, is Paul Auster. The manner in which he expresses his experience of the mid-life conflict...so simply put, so purely felt...is well worth quoting here:
"I'm well into my fifties now and things change for you as you get older. Time begins slipping away, and simple arithmetic tells you there are more years behind you than ahead of you - many more. Your body starts breaking down, you have aches and pains that weren't there before, and little by little the people you love begin to die. By the age of fifty, most of us are haunted by ghosts. They live inside us and we spend as much time talking to the dead as to the living. It's hard for a young person to understand this. It's not that a twenty year old doesn't know he's going to die, but it's the loss of others that so profoundly affects an older person - you can't know what that accumulation of losses is going to do to you until you experience it yourself. Life is so short, so fragile, so mystifying. After all, how many people do we actually love in a lifetime? Just a few, a tiny few. When most of them are gone, the map of your inner world changes. As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy."
This four-part collection has its ups and downs in terms of focus and substance, but on the whole I found it fascinating as a record of artistic thought.
November 5, 2009
I stayed up half the night finishing this book. What a GREAT book. Some of the greatest writers talking about their craft, how they began, what influenced them. The interviewers were sharp, witty and knew the writers they were talking to. I found myself wanting to run out and get the 3 volumes that preceded this one. I am sure this book will be of interest to anyone who loves to read, for writers who are learning their craft and for those who are both. I recommend this book to everyone!!!!!
July 16, 2020
Yet another marvelous, marvelous The Paris Review collection of rich interviews with brilliant writers! Even if some of the interviews were on the topics I have little interest in (modernist poetry or musical writing, for example), in all of them the singular personalities of the interviewees came shining through. My highlights were Jack Kerouac (he sounds in life just the way he writes books and it was like reading a comedy/parody), Philip Roth and Paul Auster for writerly wisdom, and David Grossman for wisdom in general.
November 12, 2009
Wow! Another Firstreads win! This is great!
What a delight—to be exposed to such a variety of opinions about the craft of writing from authors of such varied backgrounds and ethnicities. I agree with Salmon Rushdie when he states in his introduction that the interviews sometimes reveal “more of the author than even the author knows.” Marianne Moore seems rather arrogant, Kerouac is cocky (but I do love what he has to say about haiku poetry), Philip Roth seems to have a chip on his shoulder, while Wodehouse and Murkami are warm and approachable.
I was shocked about E. B. White not being a reader, saying “I would rather sail a boat than crack a book.” p.136. Conversely, Paul Auster can’t imagine anyone becoming a writer who wasn’t a voracious reader as an adolescent. Both Maya Angelou and Marilynne Robinson speak about their faith with Angelou saying she’s trying to be a Christian (how true, it’s the most any of us can do); she reads the Bible for its language. And Robinson states, “The first obligation of religion is to maintain the sense of the value of human beings. If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.” p.450.
Orphan Pamuk plots a novel by knowing the whole story line in advance, dividing it into chapters and thinking up the details of what he’d like to happen in each. Most of the writers however, like William Styron, don’t do a lot of preplanning. Murakami says, “I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what is going to happen. I just wait.” p.341. And Robinson doesn’t plot her novels. She feels action is generated out of character. Grossman says when he gets stuck while writing, he sometimes writes a letter to his protagonist to get ‘unstuck.’ John Ashbury gives us insight into the abstract or ambiguous quality of his poetry, saying he likes giving the reader the raw material to create their own poem. I discovered why in Pamuk’s book “Snow,” his character Ka’s manuscript of poetry is lost so there is no poetry in the book. Pamuk admits in the interview that poetry is not his forté.
All-in-all, the interviews are packed with information and stimulating insight. I want to re-read Wodehouse, search out Paul Auster, who I’ve never read, and dig out my old copies of John Ashbury so I can participate in his poetry.
What a delight—to be exposed to such a variety of opinions about the craft of writing from authors of such varied backgrounds and ethnicities. I agree with Salmon Rushdie when he states in his introduction that the interviews sometimes reveal “more of the author than even the author knows.” Marianne Moore seems rather arrogant, Kerouac is cocky (but I do love what he has to say about haiku poetry), Philip Roth seems to have a chip on his shoulder, while Wodehouse and Murkami are warm and approachable.
I was shocked about E. B. White not being a reader, saying “I would rather sail a boat than crack a book.” p.136. Conversely, Paul Auster can’t imagine anyone becoming a writer who wasn’t a voracious reader as an adolescent. Both Maya Angelou and Marilynne Robinson speak about their faith with Angelou saying she’s trying to be a Christian (how true, it’s the most any of us can do); she reads the Bible for its language. And Robinson states, “The first obligation of religion is to maintain the sense of the value of human beings. If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves.” p.450.
Orphan Pamuk plots a novel by knowing the whole story line in advance, dividing it into chapters and thinking up the details of what he’d like to happen in each. Most of the writers however, like William Styron, don’t do a lot of preplanning. Murakami says, “I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what is going to happen. I just wait.” p.341. And Robinson doesn’t plot her novels. She feels action is generated out of character. Grossman says when he gets stuck while writing, he sometimes writes a letter to his protagonist to get ‘unstuck.’ John Ashbury gives us insight into the abstract or ambiguous quality of his poetry, saying he likes giving the reader the raw material to create their own poem. I discovered why in Pamuk’s book “Snow,” his character Ka’s manuscript of poetry is lost so there is no poetry in the book. Pamuk admits in the interview that poetry is not his forté.
All-in-all, the interviews are packed with information and stimulating insight. I want to re-read Wodehouse, search out Paul Auster, who I’ve never read, and dig out my old copies of John Ashbury so I can participate in his poetry.
June 30, 2010
Until I just looked this up, I hadn't realized that I ranked this at five stars, while I gave all the other PR Interviews four stars. Perhaps it's because this book features several of my dear favorites (Wodehouse, John Ashbery, Sondheim, Auster, Murakami), but perhaps the series is just growing on me as it continues. This is the fourth volume in what was long-billed as a trilogy; perhaps we can march Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy into another volume?
Notes:
-Oh Jack Kerouac. What weren't you on during that interview? Speaking of which:
-Interviewer: How about the Beats? Someone like Jack Kerouac, for instance, who died a few years ago?
Wodehouse: Jack Kerouac died! Did he?
Interviewer: Yes.
Wodehouse: Oh... Gosh, they do die off, don't they?
Notes:
-Oh Jack Kerouac. What weren't you on during that interview? Speaking of which:
-Interviewer: How about the Beats? Someone like Jack Kerouac, for instance, who died a few years ago?
Wodehouse: Jack Kerouac died! Did he?
Interviewer: Yes.
Wodehouse: Oh... Gosh, they do die off, don't they?
November 23, 2009
We love celebrities. We long to be star-struck. Baseball fans idolize such players as Willie Mays, the Say-Hey Kid, and A-Rod. Basketball fans love Michael Jordan and LeBron James. Football fans…well, you get the picture. Even movie fans, especially movie fans, have their heroes. These fans have ways to connect with their idols: TV interviews, magazines (SI, People).
The avid reader is no exception. He or she wants to know why William Styron wrote, or why Ezra Pound made those radio broadcasts from Italy. And, it is appropriate that the reader should be able to connect with these literary stars through the written word.
Over the decades, The Paris Review has published interviews with the literary superstars, allowing them to reveal to their fans something of themselves. In recent years, Picador has published collections of these interviews in book form.
Volume IV is now out and I’ve had the privilege of reading it. The book contains interviews with fifteen poets, fiction writers, and essayists, ranging over a fifty year period beginning in 1954 with William Styron and ending with Marilynne Robinson in 2008.
Jack Kerouac fascinated me as I watched, on the written page, his mind bounce from idea to idea like a pinball, with flashing lights and clanging bells. I especially liked one of his criteria for successful writing: “You have to be born with tragic feathers.”
E.B. White, on the other hand, was more thoughtful as he reminisced about his years with The New Yorker. He encouraged me, a writer with procrastination issues, with these words: “Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer – he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in … I am apt to let something simmer for a while before trying to put it into words.”
Haruki Murakami likened the writer to the video game designer. “Sometimes when I’m writing I feel like the designer of a video game, and at the same time, a player. I made up the program, and now I’m in the middle of it.”
Orhan Pamuk’s comments about his experiences with poetry revealed to me why I’ve never successfully related to poetry as a reader or as a writer. He said, “When I was eighteen I published some poems in Turkey, but then I quit. My explanation is that I realized that a poet is someone through whom God is speaking.” I’m not alienated from God, mind you, but I realized that God doesn’t speak to me through verse.
Each writer in each interview revealed something new. I found I had to read slowly, with frequent pauses, because the writer being interviewed made some comment which started neurons firing in my brain like popcorn popping, and I had to sort through all those thoughts before I could get back to the interview. For example, here’s a portion of Marilynne Robinson’s comments about the friction between science and religion: “The debate seems to be between a naïve understanding of religion and a naïve understanding of science … The us-versus-them mentality is a terrible corruption of the whole culture.”
Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson!
The avid reader is no exception. He or she wants to know why William Styron wrote, or why Ezra Pound made those radio broadcasts from Italy. And, it is appropriate that the reader should be able to connect with these literary stars through the written word.
Over the decades, The Paris Review has published interviews with the literary superstars, allowing them to reveal to their fans something of themselves. In recent years, Picador has published collections of these interviews in book form.
Volume IV is now out and I’ve had the privilege of reading it. The book contains interviews with fifteen poets, fiction writers, and essayists, ranging over a fifty year period beginning in 1954 with William Styron and ending with Marilynne Robinson in 2008.
Jack Kerouac fascinated me as I watched, on the written page, his mind bounce from idea to idea like a pinball, with flashing lights and clanging bells. I especially liked one of his criteria for successful writing: “You have to be born with tragic feathers.”
E.B. White, on the other hand, was more thoughtful as he reminisced about his years with The New Yorker. He encouraged me, a writer with procrastination issues, with these words: “Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer – he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in … I am apt to let something simmer for a while before trying to put it into words.”
Haruki Murakami likened the writer to the video game designer. “Sometimes when I’m writing I feel like the designer of a video game, and at the same time, a player. I made up the program, and now I’m in the middle of it.”
Orhan Pamuk’s comments about his experiences with poetry revealed to me why I’ve never successfully related to poetry as a reader or as a writer. He said, “When I was eighteen I published some poems in Turkey, but then I quit. My explanation is that I realized that a poet is someone through whom God is speaking.” I’m not alienated from God, mind you, but I realized that God doesn’t speak to me through verse.
Each writer in each interview revealed something new. I found I had to read slowly, with frequent pauses, because the writer being interviewed made some comment which started neurons firing in my brain like popcorn popping, and I had to sort through all those thoughts before I could get back to the interview. For example, here’s a portion of Marilynne Robinson’s comments about the friction between science and religion: “The debate seems to be between a naïve understanding of religion and a naïve understanding of science … The us-versus-them mentality is a terrible corruption of the whole culture.”
Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson!
September 7, 2024
I could only get my hands on volume 4 unfortunately but I will endeavour to get a hold of the rest at some point!
The interviews are taken from across the history of The Paris Review and arranged chronologically- the lack of specificity and depth in some of the early interviews is quickly improved upon to produce some of the most insightful and well-researched interviews in the field of literature.
There are some interesting crosslinks here that can only be the result of a fine editor - compare, for example, Ezra Pound and P. G. Wodehouse reflecting on their times spent broadcasting on behalf of Axis forces in WWII. Both deny that had any knowledge of wrongdoing - one is more believable than the other.
Contents:
Introduction - Salman Rushdie
William Styron (1954)
Marianne Moore (1960)
Ezra Pound (1962)
Jack Kerouac (1968)
E. B. White (1969)
P. G. Wodehouse (1975)
John Ashbery (1983)
Philip Roth (1984)
Maya Angelou (1990)
Stephen Sondheim (1997)
Paul Auster (2003)
Haruki Murakami (2004)
Orhan Pamuk (2005)
David Grossman (2007)
Marilynne Robinson (2008)
Choice Quotations (note that an author not being here probably just means their interview lacked a pithy aphorism to excerpt and doesn’t reflect its quality!)
“Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe” - Ezra Pound
“Well, look, did you ever hear a guy telling a long wild tale to a bunch of men in a bar and all are listening and smiling, did you ever hear that guy stop to revise himself, go back to a previous sentence to improve it, to defray its rhythmic thought impact? . . . If he pauses to blow his nose, isn’t he planning his next sentence? And when he lets that next sentence loose, isn’t it once and for all the way he wanted to say it? Doesn’t he depart from the thought of that sentence and, as Shakespeare says, “forever holds his tongue” on the subject, since he’s passed over it like a part of a river that flows over a rock once and for all and never returns and can never flow any other way in time?” - Jack Kerouac
“Every paragraph is a poem.” - Jack Kerouac
“It’s rather hard to be a good artist and also be able to explain intelligently what your art is about. In fact, the worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about, at least I would like to think so.” - John Ashbery
“And I think that any true work of art does defuse criticism; if it left anything important to be said, it wouldn’t be doing its job.” - John Ashbery
“I don’t believe in automatic writing as the surrealists were supposed to have practiced it, simply because it is not a reflection of the whole mind, which is partly logical and reasonable, and that part should have its say too.” - John Ashbery
“I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, Is he as crazy as I am? I don’t need that question answered.” - Philip Roth (quoting JCO)
(Speaking of the need for the author, in writing a self-insert character like Nathan Zuckerman, to be present both as author and character)
“Think of the ventriloquist. He speaks so that his voice appears to proceed from someone at a distance from himself. But if he weren’t in your line of vision you’d get no pleasure from his art at all” - Philip Roth
“You’re asking me about the relationship between art and life? It’s like the relationship between the eight hundred or so hours that it took to be psychoanalyzed, and the eight or so hours that it would take to read Portnoy’s Complaint aloud. Life is long and art is shorter.” - Philip Roth
“I am not interested in writing about what people should do for the good of the human race and pretending that’s what they do do, but writing about what they do indeed do.” - Philip Roth
“Autobiography is awfully seductive—it’s wonderful. Once I got into it I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass—the slave narrative—speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning we.” - Maya Angelou
“I don’t know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they’re telling the truth. The fact is they’re using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they’re telling the truth about the human being—what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.” - Maya Angelou
“I wish my prose to be transparent—I don’t want the reader to stumble over me. I want him to look through what I’m saying to what I’m describing.” - V. S. Naipaul
“A novel is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.” - Paul Auster
(On writing) “I always compare it to discovering sex. The moment before you do it, you have only a vague notion of what it will be like. It’s threatening, it’s attractive, it’s everything. The moment after, you don’t understand how you lived all your life without it” - David Grossman
Recommendations:
Philip Roth: The least exciting interviews are the ones where the interviewee is too polite, too held back, to say anything really insightful. Roth is outspoken and unrestrained in a widely ranging interview.
John Ashbery: Ashbery gives a thoughtful, measured interview on his work and his approach to poetry.
Maya Angelou: Angelou is an excellent orator and knows how to keep a captive audience - more than that, she has an endearing openness and warmth.
Jack Kerouac: Much, much, funnier than I thought he was. Kerouac and co. have fallen far from their zenith in the cultural consciousness, but this made me want to read some of his stuff. (They drink and do drugs throughout the interview)
The interviews are taken from across the history of The Paris Review and arranged chronologically- the lack of specificity and depth in some of the early interviews is quickly improved upon to produce some of the most insightful and well-researched interviews in the field of literature.
There are some interesting crosslinks here that can only be the result of a fine editor - compare, for example, Ezra Pound and P. G. Wodehouse reflecting on their times spent broadcasting on behalf of Axis forces in WWII. Both deny that had any knowledge of wrongdoing - one is more believable than the other.
Contents:
Introduction - Salman Rushdie
William Styron (1954)
Marianne Moore (1960)
Ezra Pound (1962)
Jack Kerouac (1968)
E. B. White (1969)
P. G. Wodehouse (1975)
John Ashbery (1983)
Philip Roth (1984)
Maya Angelou (1990)
Stephen Sondheim (1997)
Paul Auster (2003)
Haruki Murakami (2004)
Orhan Pamuk (2005)
David Grossman (2007)
Marilynne Robinson (2008)
Choice Quotations (note that an author not being here probably just means their interview lacked a pithy aphorism to excerpt and doesn’t reflect its quality!)
“Somebody said that I am the last American living the tragedy of Europe” - Ezra Pound
“Well, look, did you ever hear a guy telling a long wild tale to a bunch of men in a bar and all are listening and smiling, did you ever hear that guy stop to revise himself, go back to a previous sentence to improve it, to defray its rhythmic thought impact? . . . If he pauses to blow his nose, isn’t he planning his next sentence? And when he lets that next sentence loose, isn’t it once and for all the way he wanted to say it? Doesn’t he depart from the thought of that sentence and, as Shakespeare says, “forever holds his tongue” on the subject, since he’s passed over it like a part of a river that flows over a rock once and for all and never returns and can never flow any other way in time?” - Jack Kerouac
“Every paragraph is a poem.” - Jack Kerouac
“It’s rather hard to be a good artist and also be able to explain intelligently what your art is about. In fact, the worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about, at least I would like to think so.” - John Ashbery
“And I think that any true work of art does defuse criticism; if it left anything important to be said, it wouldn’t be doing its job.” - John Ashbery
“I don’t believe in automatic writing as the surrealists were supposed to have practiced it, simply because it is not a reflection of the whole mind, which is partly logical and reasonable, and that part should have its say too.” - John Ashbery
“I don’t ask writers about their work habits. I really don’t care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they’re actually trying to find out, Is he as crazy as I am? I don’t need that question answered.” - Philip Roth (quoting JCO)
(Speaking of the need for the author, in writing a self-insert character like Nathan Zuckerman, to be present both as author and character)
“Think of the ventriloquist. He speaks so that his voice appears to proceed from someone at a distance from himself. But if he weren’t in your line of vision you’d get no pleasure from his art at all” - Philip Roth
“You’re asking me about the relationship between art and life? It’s like the relationship between the eight hundred or so hours that it took to be psychoanalyzed, and the eight or so hours that it would take to read Portnoy’s Complaint aloud. Life is long and art is shorter.” - Philip Roth
“I am not interested in writing about what people should do for the good of the human race and pretending that’s what they do do, but writing about what they do indeed do.” - Philip Roth
“Autobiography is awfully seductive—it’s wonderful. Once I got into it I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass—the slave narrative—speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning we.” - Maya Angelou
“I don’t know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they’re telling the truth. The fact is they’re using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they’re telling the truth about the human being—what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.” - Maya Angelou
“I wish my prose to be transparent—I don’t want the reader to stumble over me. I want him to look through what I’m saying to what I’m describing.” - V. S. Naipaul
“A novel is the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on terms of absolute intimacy.” - Paul Auster
(On writing) “I always compare it to discovering sex. The moment before you do it, you have only a vague notion of what it will be like. It’s threatening, it’s attractive, it’s everything. The moment after, you don’t understand how you lived all your life without it” - David Grossman
Recommendations:
Philip Roth: The least exciting interviews are the ones where the interviewee is too polite, too held back, to say anything really insightful. Roth is outspoken and unrestrained in a widely ranging interview.
John Ashbery: Ashbery gives a thoughtful, measured interview on his work and his approach to poetry.
Maya Angelou: Angelou is an excellent orator and knows how to keep a captive audience - more than that, she has an endearing openness and warmth.
Jack Kerouac: Much, much, funnier than I thought he was. Kerouac and co. have fallen far from their zenith in the cultural consciousness, but this made me want to read some of his stuff. (They drink and do drugs throughout the interview)
May 27, 2015
Mwahahaha... I love this book. I have never read any of the Paris Reviews before, and now I'm incredibly bummed to find that I was missing something amazing. Great writers talk about their books, their influences, their writing process, and just literature in general.
The interviews are a great way to enter the mind of the writers behind the greatest novels (and poems) of the century. They're sleek and smart, insightful and witty. I love them. And I will be sure to work my way through the other volumes as well. A definite read for those who want to learn to write.
The interviews are a great way to enter the mind of the writers behind the greatest novels (and poems) of the century. They're sleek and smart, insightful and witty. I love them. And I will be sure to work my way through the other volumes as well. A definite read for those who want to learn to write.
February 19, 2010
A fascinating four-volume series. Essential reading for anyone interested in the creative process of some of the world's most highly regarded authors, playwrights, and poets.
Highlights in this volume are the interviews with E. B. White and John Ashbury. I was almost tempted to skip the one with Kerouac. God, what an idiot.
Anyway - read them. All of them.
Highlights in this volume are the interviews with E. B. White and John Ashbury. I was almost tempted to skip the one with Kerouac. God, what an idiot.
Anyway - read them. All of them.
Want to read
December 21, 2009My 2009 motto? If Sarah Montambo likes it, Hells Yes!
Read
March 3, 2010A big thanks to Frances and Camille for turning me on to the Paris Review interviews! I received the third and fourth volumes of the selected interviews for Christmas, and have been making my slow but delighted way through the fourth ever since. Number Four contains interviews with two of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami and Marilynne Robinson (which is why I started here), but it's chock full of thoughts from other luminaries of the last 75 years, including but not limited to William Styron, Marianne Moore, Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, P.G. Wodehouse, Maya Angelou, and Paul Auster.
It's always hard to write about collections of things - poems, short stories, interviews, essays. How to encompass what made the reading experience special, when a collection is composed of many diverse parts rather than a unified whole? But here's what I'd like to say about reading these interviews: truly, I got so much more out of them than I anticipated. I was expecting to page through, perhaps even skim, the interviews with authors I hadn't read, pausing for a more in-depth read only on the relatively few with whose work I was familiar. This is not what happened. Not even close. Instead, I found myself feeling more as if I were reading character-driven short stories than mundane "interviews." The distinctive voice of each author came through so clearly: Styron's crotchety, expansive good-old-boy-ism; Moore's careful precision; Kerouac's self-involved exuberance; Wodehouse's sunny, bumbling optimism; Naipul's jumpy reticience, eventually overcome. Sometimes, as with Kerouac, these personas were the ones I expected to find. Other times, probably more often than not, they held surprises. Paul Auster, for example: given the hard-polished, seemingly soulless cleverness of his New York Trilogy , I was expecting a self-congratulatory cynic. Instead, he struck me as shockingly sincere. Listen to him gush, for example, about what the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne:
I relate so strongly to Auster's joy here at finding a multi-facetedness to Hawthorne—a deadpan humor and a liking for good cigars, when all most people see is a "gloomy, tormented figure." The humanizing influence is so charming, both in what Auster has to say about Hawthorne, and in what the interview reveals about Auster himself. Reading his interview made me reevaluate my relationship to his work, which I had regarded as a kind of clever joke on the reader, but which I now tend to think about in a more serious light. On one hand, I think this makes The New York Trilogy slightly less successful, due to its lack of soul...but on the other hand, knowing there's more substance to the author than I had realized makes me more excited to read his other work. I'm now inclined to judge him more stringently, but with more respect.
I mean, what a gorgeous observation! And really, the whole volume is full of this kind of gem. One of my most exciting discoveries is the poet John Ashbery, whom I admit I had never heard of before reading his interview. I connected with it so strongly, though, that I sought out Ashbery's work and am now in the midst of his gorgeous yet enigmatic Notes from the Air. I related to his account of gradually coming to the realization that the people who produced nineteenth-century poetry had their own vital reality:
I remember going through this same process of realization about pre-contemporary literature (say, anything published before 1900) early in college. It was a visceral, un-cerebral epiphany; I reached a point at which I had amassed enough life experience myself to be able to empathize with and relate to people whose worldviews were very different from my own—to recognize what was essentially similar through the veil of differences. Before it happened, I experienced Shakespeare as a kind of alien being, whose characters, I had to accept, acted in ways not understandable in terms of my own existence. Which offered me very limited options for interacting with his texts. Sometime early in college something clicked for me, and I recognize the motivations that make Hamlet dither over killing his uncle, or Edgar put off revealing his identity to Gloucester. They suddenly seemed like real people to me, just living in different circumstances. (Obviously Ashbery has benefited from his long career in poetry; look how much more concise his version of this process is than mine!)
So too, I shared Ashbery's thoughts on ambiguity in art:
This idea seems very apropos to the recent Woolf in Winter discussions. Woolf is the poster girl of so-called "depressing" modern art, yet I find much of her work positively exhilarating, and I think a lot of it has to do with her ability to evoke and even celebrate ongoing ambiguity. Most of my favorite writers—Woolf, Ishiguro, Welty, Proust—are able to coexist peacefully with conflicting impulses and uncertainties, and resist tying anything up into a neat little package for the reader. Perhaps I wouldn't go so far as to say that their work makes me feel "cheerful," but it does match up with my lived experience, and so gives me the deeply-felt pleasure of discovering a kindred spirit. As Murakami says in his own interview, "I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions."
There's no way I can share all the satisfying moments and fascinating tidbits in these interviews. I loved learning about the process by which Murakami's novels get translated into English (some smaller countries actually translate from the English rather than the original Japanese!); was engrossed by David Grossman's reflections on control of language in the Israeli press; was impressed by Hermione Lee's insightful questions in her interview with Philip Roth; was gobsmacked to learn that Stephen Sondheim grew up in a surrogate-son relationship to Oscar Hammerstein, and learned song-writing from him (and was also intrigued by Sondheim's reflections on how much less suited the English language is to writing rhyming poetry than the French and Italian). My ear for gossipy details loved picking up little facts of the writer's life—that Maya Angelou rents hotel rooms and writes on the unmade beds, for example.
But what I loved most about reading these interviews was basking in the sense that what we all do, here in the book-blogging world—talking about literature; wrestling with how it works and why; pondering the mysteries of it—is work that's worthwhile, and even important, to do. I look forward to my slow but rewarding journey through the other three volumes and beyond.
It's always hard to write about collections of things - poems, short stories, interviews, essays. How to encompass what made the reading experience special, when a collection is composed of many diverse parts rather than a unified whole? But here's what I'd like to say about reading these interviews: truly, I got so much more out of them than I anticipated. I was expecting to page through, perhaps even skim, the interviews with authors I hadn't read, pausing for a more in-depth read only on the relatively few with whose work I was familiar. This is not what happened. Not even close. Instead, I found myself feeling more as if I were reading character-driven short stories than mundane "interviews." The distinctive voice of each author came through so clearly: Styron's crotchety, expansive good-old-boy-ism; Moore's careful precision; Kerouac's self-involved exuberance; Wodehouse's sunny, bumbling optimism; Naipul's jumpy reticience, eventually overcome. Sometimes, as with Kerouac, these personas were the ones I expected to find. Other times, probably more often than not, they held surprises. Paul Auster, for example: given the hard-polished, seemingly soulless cleverness of his New York Trilogy , I was expecting a self-congratulatory cynic. Instead, he struck me as shockingly sincere. Listen to him gush, for example, about what the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne:
But there's more to Hawthorne than just his stories and novels. I'm equally attached to his notebooks, which contain some of his strongest, most brilliant prose. The diary he kept about taking care of his five-year-old son for three weeks in 1851 is a self-contained work. It can stand on its own, and it's so charming, so funny in its deadpan way, that it gives an entirely new picture of Hawthorne. He wasn't the gloomy, tormented figure most people think he was. Or not only that. He was a loving father, and husband, a man who liked a good cigar and a glass or two of whiskey, and he was playful, generous, and warmhearted. Exceedingly shy, yes, but someone who enjoyed the simple pleasures of the world.
I relate so strongly to Auster's joy here at finding a multi-facetedness to Hawthorne—a deadpan humor and a liking for good cigars, when all most people see is a "gloomy, tormented figure." The humanizing influence is so charming, both in what Auster has to say about Hawthorne, and in what the interview reveals about Auster himself. Reading his interview made me reevaluate my relationship to his work, which I had regarded as a kind of clever joke on the reader, but which I now tend to think about in a more serious light. On one hand, I think this makes The New York Trilogy slightly less successful, due to its lack of soul...but on the other hand, knowing there's more substance to the author than I had realized makes me more excited to read his other work. I'm now inclined to judge him more stringently, but with more respect.
By the age of fifty, most of us are haunted by ghosts. They live inside us and we spend as much time talking to the dead as to the living. It's hard for a young person to understand this. It's not that a twenty year old doesn't know he's going to die, but it's the loss of others that so profoundly affects an older person—and you can't know what that accumulation of losses is going to do to you until you experience it yourself. Life is so short, so fragile, so mystifying. After all, how many people do we actually love in the course of a lifetime? Just a few, a tiny few. When most of them are gone, the map of your inner world changes. As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.
I mean, what a gorgeous observation! And really, the whole volume is full of this kind of gem. One of my most exciting discoveries is the poet John Ashbery, whom I admit I had never heard of before reading his interview. I connected with it so strongly, though, that I sought out Ashbery's work and am now in the midst of his gorgeous yet enigmatic Notes from the Air. I related to his account of gradually coming to the realization that the people who produced nineteenth-century poetry had their own vital reality:
I didn't really get a feeling for the poetry of the past until I had discovered modern poetry. Then I began to see how nineteenth-century poetry wasn't just something lifeless in an ancient museum but must have grown out of the lives of the people who wrote it.
I remember going through this same process of realization about pre-contemporary literature (say, anything published before 1900) early in college. It was a visceral, un-cerebral epiphany; I reached a point at which I had amassed enough life experience myself to be able to empathize with and relate to people whose worldviews were very different from my own—to recognize what was essentially similar through the veil of differences. Before it happened, I experienced Shakespeare as a kind of alien being, whose characters, I had to accept, acted in ways not understandable in terms of my own existence. Which offered me very limited options for interacting with his texts. Sometime early in college something clicked for me, and I recognize the motivations that make Hamlet dither over killing his uncle, or Edgar put off revealing his identity to Gloucester. They suddenly seemed like real people to me, just living in different circumstances. (Obviously Ashbery has benefited from his long career in poetry; look how much more concise his version of this process is than mine!)
So too, I shared Ashbery's thoughts on ambiguity in art:
The idea of relief from pain has something to do with ambiguity. Ambiguity supposes eventual resolution of itself, whereas certitude implies further ambiguity. I guess that is why so much "depressing" modern art makes me feel cheerful.
This idea seems very apropos to the recent Woolf in Winter discussions. Woolf is the poster girl of so-called "depressing" modern art, yet I find much of her work positively exhilarating, and I think a lot of it has to do with her ability to evoke and even celebrate ongoing ambiguity. Most of my favorite writers—Woolf, Ishiguro, Welty, Proust—are able to coexist peacefully with conflicting impulses and uncertainties, and resist tying anything up into a neat little package for the reader. Perhaps I wouldn't go so far as to say that their work makes me feel "cheerful," but it does match up with my lived experience, and so gives me the deeply-felt pleasure of discovering a kindred spirit. As Murakami says in his own interview, "I always hope to position myself away from so-called conclusions."
There's no way I can share all the satisfying moments and fascinating tidbits in these interviews. I loved learning about the process by which Murakami's novels get translated into English (some smaller countries actually translate from the English rather than the original Japanese!); was engrossed by David Grossman's reflections on control of language in the Israeli press; was impressed by Hermione Lee's insightful questions in her interview with Philip Roth; was gobsmacked to learn that Stephen Sondheim grew up in a surrogate-son relationship to Oscar Hammerstein, and learned song-writing from him (and was also intrigued by Sondheim's reflections on how much less suited the English language is to writing rhyming poetry than the French and Italian). My ear for gossipy details loved picking up little facts of the writer's life—that Maya Angelou rents hotel rooms and writes on the unmade beds, for example.
But what I loved most about reading these interviews was basking in the sense that what we all do, here in the book-blogging world—talking about literature; wrestling with how it works and why; pondering the mysteries of it—is work that's worthwhile, and even important, to do. I look forward to my slow but rewarding journey through the other three volumes and beyond.
October 6, 2022
I like to read these every now and then when i’ve got some quick time to kill. Most of the interviews are great and provide some solid insight into the writers. Some of my favs from this vol would be in order
- Maya Angelou
- EB White
- Ezra Pound
- Philip Roth
- Marilynne Robinson
If you’re ever looking for some new books to read I find that the interviews are a great way to get interested.
- Maya Angelou
- EB White
- Ezra Pound
- Philip Roth
- Marilynne Robinson
If you’re ever looking for some new books to read I find that the interviews are a great way to get interested.
February 17, 2020
These books are absolute gold. Nothing better as far as craft and that writer life exists.
September 16, 2010
This fourth volume in the series surprised me in a good way. While V. S. Naipul gabs the title for being the most arrogant and - in a bad way - preposterous, this is very much mitigated and made up for by people such as Haruki Murakami, David Grossman, P. G. Wodehouse, Philip Roth and E. B. White.
Most of the authors came across as hard-working and continually writing and re-writing, talking of the shitty first draft. Marilynne Robinson and Murakami don't seem to have this problem at all, instead writing as though the drafts were in their head. In Robinson's case, however, this might very well be because of her belief in god.
Murakami came across as gentle and flowing in his descriptions, while Philip Roth brought aggressive earnest to the table. While Maya Angelou spoke of her childhood, muteness and the importance of having somebody to write for, Wodehouse was (at 91,5 years old at the time of his interview) happy-go-lucky and seemingly carefree, not worrying much.
Grossman's words on Kafka were insightful, and John Ashbery was a real poet in real-time, as his interview, providing insight into his authorship as well on his former, drunken self, was really good.
Orhan Pamuk was interviewed well, and gave quite a few insights both into his novel and about his authorship as a Turk.
All in all, maybe the best volume in the series, spanning more half a decade in the making, containing both interviews with Americans and others, from the past to the present, with authors stylistic and those more stream-of-consciousness.
Brilliant way to end it (not entirely, I hope).
Most of the authors came across as hard-working and continually writing and re-writing, talking of the shitty first draft. Marilynne Robinson and Murakami don't seem to have this problem at all, instead writing as though the drafts were in their head. In Robinson's case, however, this might very well be because of her belief in god.
Murakami came across as gentle and flowing in his descriptions, while Philip Roth brought aggressive earnest to the table. While Maya Angelou spoke of her childhood, muteness and the importance of having somebody to write for, Wodehouse was (at 91,5 years old at the time of his interview) happy-go-lucky and seemingly carefree, not worrying much.
Grossman's words on Kafka were insightful, and John Ashbery was a real poet in real-time, as his interview, providing insight into his authorship as well on his former, drunken self, was really good.
Orhan Pamuk was interviewed well, and gave quite a few insights both into his novel and about his authorship as a Turk.
All in all, maybe the best volume in the series, spanning more half a decade in the making, containing both interviews with Americans and others, from the past to the present, with authors stylistic and those more stream-of-consciousness.
Brilliant way to end it (not entirely, I hope).
Read
January 10, 2024Because sometimes I am tired of being myself.—Haruki Murakami
As one reads the Paris Review Interviews, one soon realises that one is experiencing the birth of a new genre. I suppose that letter-writing is a dead art, and of course sadly so. Yet I at the same time suppose that it is just as well. There are already enough letters in the world, and good ones, which one hasn't got the time to read. Letters of Kafka are good, but have you read Flaubert's? There's a handsome volume of selected letters - some six hundred or so pages, which includes about a dozen previously unpublished letters. Oh no, I recently discovered the letters of Emily Dickinson, I'm reading that now. Good lord, she wrote letters? I was going to read Keats's letters, but now there seems to be need for a little detour . . . . Whitman wrote them, so did Austen, so did Joyce. Every one of the oldies wrote letters. We poor readers always want more. We say of Shakespeare, how nice 't would have been, had his letters survived. But of course we'd have piled them up with all those other letter books, with a big Complete Plays of Shakespeare at the bottom of that pile. So then maybe it's just as well.
But then the writer, having poured his soul out in his novels, his poems, his plays, now needs to pour out his heart and especially his mind in some other form. It only need seem that he does so unwillingly, otherwise we start suspicioning. These writers are usually up to no good, when they are self-conscious. We love to catch them in their pyjamas, preferably a little hang over, in their living rooms. In their suits and thick-lensed spectacles they just can't help but lie. That's why we love the letter. We are intrigued by the prospect of catching a glimpse of the writer not at his desk but about the room, walking the room, or doing whatever else it is those creatures do in those rooms all those hour, for you can't tell me they are ever at their desks writing, and expect me to believe you. That glimpse is, of course, uncatchable in the interview, for those very things we're interested in are those that the writer does while he's all alone, and the interview, like the tango, takes two.
But so much for comparisons; there is no knowing truly what boring, what intriguing, what tiresome, what strenuous, what nervous, what lazy secret lives the writers lead. Writing, being in more ways similar to reading than most other activities, must breed the same kind of lives that reading does, and the reader, in his curiosity, is more or less correct in presuming that where he pauses his reading to eat a peach, the writer too paused to eat a peach, if metaphorical. Therefore let's leave the matter at that, and think no more of these things in this way.
Reading them, these Paris Review interviews, one is at once disappointed and comforted, at once surprised and not. All these emotions are of course excited by the fact that the Paris Review interviews reveal the human in the writers, and where one is disappointed that there is so little mystery in such supposedly mysterious creatures, one is comforted to know that one might just end up becoming one, if only one can get oneself to sit still and just let oneself think oneself capable of composing a sentence in a more or less composed, fairly learned, preferably unpretentious manner. One feels oneself capable, too. And because one knows oneself incapable, one is surprised to find that the whole seemingly commonplace conversation, the whole interview thing, has revealed little if anything, and one is not surprised, after all, for we already know how good these writers are, and wouldn't it be a little naïve of them to reveal too much (if even that) of their secret lives?▪At any rate, it would be naïve of the reader to believe everything they say, these writers. One recalls the stories that Faulkner told of his experiences in a war he has missed; how he even had the scars to show for it. In short, we expect these writers to be tactful, for we know them to be so. We expect them to "tell the whole truth, but [to] tell it slant", as one of the oldies put it.
But obviously there are writers one would necessarily believe to be speaking the entire truth. They are so gentle they cannot be liars, deceptive creatures they are. Who would expect such a gentle old guy like Don DeLillo to tell a lie? But how, at the same time, can one expect the creator of Nick from Underworld, or Oswald from Libra, or the subtle Jack Gladney from White Noise to be wholly honest? He is too intelligent in those works to be expected to take a stand about such matters as are discussed in his interview.
On the other hand, PG Wodehouse is entirely believable. Prior to the interview here published, I thought he was some great old obscure novelist from 19th century America, a less fortunate contemporary of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. How surprised I was to learn that he was a sunny-spirited old guy from England, known for his comic works! And how very disappointed by that "suniness of spirit", that absolute optimism one doesn't expect in a true artist.
Of course one is glad to know him, anyway, even if one is barely compelled to go read his stuff. He is better than the execrable, callow Kerouac; he is better than the snobbish E B White, who is perhaps the only other instance of writer too happy to be interesting, yet he, White, still manages to be interesting in his own small way, if only for his unpretentiousness; he is better than the somewhat unoriginal Auster, both as writer and as interviewee.
But what great satisfaction one gets from the truly interesting subjects: Marilyne Robinson is sassy and she i believes in God, even gives sermons at church! How great a talker, so ironical, so twisty, Philip Roth turns out to be. How Maya Angelou seems to speak across time and space, until one somehow hears her great orator's voice speaking from that podium. How one feels oneself to have found a friend in John Ashbery, that gentle soul. And how fantastic to find that Harold Bloom is as grandiose and grumpy as ever, and unapologetic, and smart, and formidably knowledgeable. One wants to go back and hear these great talkers talk talk talk, but the greatest effect one leaves these great interviews with, is the urge to go read the books they wrote immediately, while their human voices still linger in one's mind.
The interview, as a form, has more limits than the letter, naturally. But also not. The best writers i have always thought are the stammerers, the stutterers, the lispers and the murmurers. The best writers are so much in their rooms writing that their tongues grow heavy from disuse. Then we start to suspect a good speaker. He's an orator, a public figure, not the hermit we would like. Yet we always expect the best writers to be good with letters also, since a letter is written. When a writer strikes a cord we did not expect in the interview, we are amazed, but also a little suspicious. How can we tell the rehearsed from the spontaneous?
▪
Currently reading
December 14, 2009I was in Binghamton the other day with time for lunch, and nothing to read. It turns out that there is a pretty good little bookstore about three blocks from the courthouse, and after a bit of browsing I settled on this.
The Paris Review Interview series were originally issued in more-or-less chronological order, and I read the first four volumes in the series that way. They are long out-of-print, and this reissue series blends newer interviews with older ones in a pattern I haven't been able to discern. This one, for example, has Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound, which I'd read years ago, and also P. G. Wodehouse, Stephen Sondheim, and Haruki Murakami.
I'd forgotten how oblique the Pound interview (conducted by Donald Hall) was. I think I thought I understood it back then, but I don't any more. Interestingly they ask Wodehouse about his wartime, uh, indiscretion, but Hall doesn't go near it with Pound.
I've been meaning to start reading fiction again, and mostly this was a book I picked up to push me in that direction. I suspect that what will happen instead is that I will go back and read more of these sets of interviews.
The Paris Review Interview series were originally issued in more-or-less chronological order, and I read the first four volumes in the series that way. They are long out-of-print, and this reissue series blends newer interviews with older ones in a pattern I haven't been able to discern. This one, for example, has Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound, which I'd read years ago, and also P. G. Wodehouse, Stephen Sondheim, and Haruki Murakami.
I'd forgotten how oblique the Pound interview (conducted by Donald Hall) was. I think I thought I understood it back then, but I don't any more. Interestingly they ask Wodehouse about his wartime, uh, indiscretion, but Hall doesn't go near it with Pound.
I've been meaning to start reading fiction again, and mostly this was a book I picked up to push me in that direction. I suspect that what will happen instead is that I will go back and read more of these sets of interviews.
October 27, 2009
I won The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. IV, in a Good Reads contest. It was no accident that I entered this drawing. I've read and loved the previous three volumes. Volume IV is as terrific as the preceding books.
Volume IV contain author interviews, culled from the pages of the Paris Review, that includes Marianne Moore, P.G. Wodehouse, Haruki Murakami, and many more. The earliest interview is with William Styron in 1954; the latest is with Marilynne Robinson in 2008. The interviews not only capture the authors, but also a bit of the times in which they were conducted.
The Paris Review Interviews are insightful, interesting, and often witty, funny and quotable. Reading the collection is not merely entertaining; it sharpens the readers own sensibilities about good writing and good literature.
Highly recommended for people who love books.
Volume IV contain author interviews, culled from the pages of the Paris Review, that includes Marianne Moore, P.G. Wodehouse, Haruki Murakami, and many more. The earliest interview is with William Styron in 1954; the latest is with Marilynne Robinson in 2008. The interviews not only capture the authors, but also a bit of the times in which they were conducted.
The Paris Review Interviews are insightful, interesting, and often witty, funny and quotable. Reading the collection is not merely entertaining; it sharpens the readers own sensibilities about good writing and good literature.
Highly recommended for people who love books.
February 4, 2010
This is a it-does-what-it-says-on-the-tin kind of a book. All you need to do is look at the list and you will either love it or loathe it:
The interviews are of the standard we’ve come to expect. The only issue really is if the authors interest you.
You can read a full review on my blog here
America: William Styron, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Jack Kerouac, E. B. White, John Ashbery, Philip Roth, Maya Angelou, Stephen Sondheim, Marilynne Robinson
United Kingdom: P. G. Wodehouse
Trinidad: V. S. Naipaul
Japan: Haruki Murakami
Turkey: Orhan Pamuk
Israel: David Grossman
The interviews are of the standard we’ve come to expect. The only issue really is if the authors interest you.
You can read a full review on my blog here
July 12, 2010
William Styron *****
Marianne Moore ****o
Ezra Pound ***oo
Jack Kerouac ****o
E. B. White ***oo
P. G. Wodehouse ***oo
John Ashbery ***oo
Philip Roth ***oo
Maya Angelou ***oo
Stephen Sondheim ****o
V. S. Naipaul ***oo
Paul Auster ***oo
Haruki Murakami ****o
Orhan Pamuk ****o
David Grossman ***00
Marilynne Robinson ***oo
Marianne Moore ****o
Ezra Pound ***oo
Jack Kerouac ****o
E. B. White ***oo
P. G. Wodehouse ***oo
John Ashbery ***oo
Philip Roth ***oo
Maya Angelou ***oo
Stephen Sondheim ****o
V. S. Naipaul ***oo
Paul Auster ***oo
Haruki Murakami ****o
Orhan Pamuk ****o
David Grossman ***00
Marilynne Robinson ***oo
Want to read
October 3, 2009I'm a big fan of this series- I'm glad it's making a comeback.
November 1, 2011
Wonderful as always.
March 12, 2012
I wanted to start with the first volume, but this was the only one at the library. Fascinating.
July 8, 2013
The Murakami one was pretty good in here. At least, that's the one I remember the most.
April 27, 2021
This is one fourth of a powerful collection of interviews with an international cast of first-rate poets, novelists, and musicians. I learned a hell of a lot about the variety of creative experiences. Surprisingly, Kerouac’s wacky interview impressed me most. Maya Angelou reminded me of her deep reservoir of equanimity. Grossman made me want to run out and one one or more of his novels. Roth had the most to say. Pamuk was fascinating on the position Turkey identity in terms of the East/West dichotomy. Robinson got me interested in her nonfiction. Auster made me order something of his online already. Naipaul confirmed my impression that he was a man of unlimited self-confidence. And so on.
October 10, 2022
A fascinating four-volume series. Essential reading for anyone interested in the creative process of some of the world's most highly regarded authors, playwrights, and poets.
Highlights in this volume are the interviews with E. B. White and John Ashbury. I was almost tempted to skip the one with Kerouac. God, what an idiot.
Anyway - read them. All of them.
Highlights in this volume are the interviews with E. B. White and John Ashbury. I was almost tempted to skip the one with Kerouac. God, what an idiot.
Anyway - read them. All of them.
February 15, 2020
Not my favourite in this series. Very few women. Mostly American men. Murakami, Paul Auster, Philip Roth, Wodehouse all bring their A-Game. But the dominant impression...Jack Kerouac was a very weird bloke.
December 12, 2019
Brillint. Sharing of personal challenges, in such a human and intelligent texts.
December 27, 2019
Interviews.
February 22, 2022
Bought it for the V.S.Naipaul interview, but there's also Ezra Pound, Haruki Murakami, Jack Kerouac, and Marianne Moore. Could be a text for a seminar on writing.
August 28, 2024
Took me on a magical tour of unexpected delights.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews