Customer Reviews

The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers

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This book is a reader's joy. From the physical presentation --- the book comes wrapped in a thick cover with a nice inside-flap folded over, like a hardcover --- to the content, this is a nicely done production. It is not just fiction writers interviewed here, either. Janet Malcolm, the journalist, was interviewed, and her piece inspired me enough to purchase her book, THE JOURNALIST AND THE MURDERER. And the writers talk about more than just fiction: they cover philosophy, the art of writing, politics, feminism, current events, you name it.

If you're an aspiring writer, this is a very fun, enjoyable book to read when you're tired of reading fiction for inspiration but want to become inspired by other means. As mentioned in the notes, (to paraphrase), "...all of the interviews are long." They all, also, inform and inspire.

Highly recommended

This series of interviews with contemporary authors who are presumably assumed to be of quality is relevatory for three reasons: the mechanics of writing, the contrast in philosophies, and the psychology of the writers. Most useful is the first, in that writers describe their method of sitting down to write and how they both conceptualize their task and discipline themselves. The second is actually a let-down: almost every writer in this book has the "workshop writer" philosophy, which is one of finding novel situations and putting people in them who then act, predictably, like machine-averaged examples of humanity. The one exception is writer George Saunders, who by tackling life beliefs outside of the ones shared in common by popular music and film and writing, showed us room for movement and actual hope that some pattern other than our current soulless pursuit of pleasure and self-importance can be achieved! Most of these people, philosophically speaking, are the kind of "artistic" dipsticks who sit around trendy bars and spout off about things they do not understand; their basic philosophy is me, me, me. Predictably, the writers from any specific political category write about that identity, and not much else, and the writers from academia write about "the soul" without understanding it has some capacity for choice and self-sacrifice. In the case of all the writers here except for Didion and Saunders, my resolution has become not to read them, because I can hear that kind of amateur doggerel for free at the local Diedrich's. Finally, regarding the psychology of writers, one can rapidly see two camps here: those who want to be writers are a career, and those who write because they feel they have something to contribute in words, some form of idea. I recommend this book to anyone because if your soul is not already plastic you will become resolved to read the latter and not the former.