The Paris Review Interviews, I [Deckle Edge] [Paperback]

The Paris Review (Author), Philip Gourevitch (Introduction)

Book Description

Series: Paris Review Interviews | Publication Date: October 17, 2006

 

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," to Joan 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.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

You won't be able to get their rueful, witty, snappish, and thoughtful voices out of your head. Here is Dorothy Parker, breathtakingly funny, brilliant, and self-deprecating. Truman Capote purring, "I am a completely horizontal author. I cannot think unless I'm lying down." Hemingway, recalcitrant and dismissive, dueling with George Plimpton in a revealing conversation containing the famous iceberg remark about writing: "There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows." As for poets, Donald Hall speaks with an urbane T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Spires with a bemusedly frank Elizabeth Bishop. Here, too, is an astonishing conversation with the erudite and gentlemanly Jorge Luis Borges, who speaks of Old Norse, Henry James, and the color yellow, and flinty Kurt Vonnegut remembering the bombing of Dresden and telling bad jokes. Several hundred of the Paris Review's justifiably celebrated literary interviews are available online, but these 16 exceptional slices of literary history belong in the form the interviewees devoted their lives to, namely a finely made book, always at hand, always compelling. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"The Paris Review books should be given out at dinner parties, readings, riots, weddings, galas -- shindigs of every shape. And they're perfect for the classroom too, from high schools all the way to MFA programs. In fact, I run a whole semester-long creative writing class based on the interviews. How else would I get the world's greatest living writers, living and dead, to come into the classroom with their words of wisdom, folly and fury? These books are wonderful, provocative, indispensible."--Colum McCann, novelist and Hunter College professor

"I have all the copies of The Paris Review and like the interviews very much. They will make a good book when collected and that will be very good for the Review."--Ernest Hemingway
 
"At their best, the Paris Review interviews remove the veils of literary personae to reveal the flesh-and-blood writer at the source. By exposing the inner workings of writing, they place the reader in the driver's seat of literature."--Billy Collins
 
"A colossal literary event--worth the price of admission for the Borges interview alone, and of course the Billy Wilder, and the Vonnegut, and and and and . . . Just buy this book and read it all."--Gary Shteyngart
 
"The Paris Review interviews have the best questions, the best answers, and are, hands down, the best way to steal a look into the minds of the best writers (and interviewers) in the world. Reading them together is like getting a fabulous guided tour through literary life."--Susan Orlean
 
"The Paris Review interviews are of course a genre unto themselves. We read them hoping the subjects will somehow betray themselves and pass their secrets for writing on to us. Although this never happens, the interviews bring us a little closer to understanding genius. This stellar collection of them is as good a place as any to start."--John Ashbery
 
"I have been fascinated by the Paris Review interviews for as long as I can remember. Taken together, they form perhaps the finest available inquiry into the 'how' of literature, in many ways a more interesting question than the 'why.'"--Salman Rushdie
 
"The Paris Review's Writers at Work series is thrilling and terrifying, in part because the writers in the interviews are not technically at work. But nonetheless! here are their wise secrets, their funny stories, their habits, dubious opinions, financial complaints--these glimpses comprise an engaging and important literary record."--Lorrie Moore
 
"Nothing is lonelier or riskier than being a writer, and these interviews provide writers at all stages the companionship and guidance they need."--Edmund White
 
"The Paris Review interviews have always provided the best look into the minds and work ethics of great writers and when read together constitute the closest thing to an MFA that you can get while sitting alone on your couch. Every page of this collection affords a ludicrous amount of pleasure."--Dave Eggers
 
"The Paris Review interviews are objects of wonder that formed my first and fiercest impression of what it was to be an author. I still ascribe any vivid remembered quote to their pages, even when it didn't appear there."--Jonathan Lethem
 
"The Paris Review is one of the few truly essential literary magazines of the twentieth century--and now of the twenty-first."--Margaret Atwood

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (October 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312361750
• ISBN-13: 978-0312361754
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #479,446 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not all are the best of the best, January 7, 2007

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Paris Review Interviews, I (Paperback)

I have read tens of 'Paris Review Interviews' and once had almost all the volumes they put out.
This volume selects sixteen of the reviews including a number which for me were most memorable. ( Borges, Bellow, Hemingway,)

The total list is:
Dorothy Parker (1956)
Truman Capote (1957)
Ernest Hemingway (1958)
T. S. Eliot (1959)
Saul Bellow (1966)
Jorge Luis Borges (1967)
Kurt Vonnegut (1977)
James M. Cain (1978)
Rebecca West (1981)
Elizabeth Bishop (1981)
Robert Stone (1985)
Robert Gottlieb (1994)
Richard Price (1996)
Billy Wilder (1996)
Jack Gilbert (2005)
Joan Didion (2006)
Aside from the writers I have named I would have preferred a collection containing other interviews, including the famous one with Faulkner.
I would just like to point out the strange reversal of roles which has occurred in our Internet world. There are tens of Paris Review Interviews online, far more than are contained in this volume. It is almost as if the book here is a kind of toy, a mere adjunct to the total product which 'Paris Review Online' the Internet makes readily available to us.
I understand the value of having a volume to hold in one's hand. And like most people I would rather read from a book than from a screen. But the 'online business' takes away from the special pleasure one might have had once at getting a 'new book' of one's own.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Paris Review , An Offering of Voice, January 9, 2007

By 

Jesse P. Daugherty (Cortland, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Paris Review Interviews, I (Paperback)

Perhaps this might be an obvious statement, for as the title indicates this collection of works from the Paris Review is a collection of interviews, but one that I feel need be made nevertheless. In reading over this wonderful work that contains interviews with Borges, Parker, Hemingway, Capote, Eliot, as well as many other legends of literature and 20th century intellectual thought, the reader is able to discover a truer sense of voice behind these renowned authors. We are given an amazing portal into the minds of these artists that ranges from how they approach their work and their diverse influences, to simply how they might view their lives and world around them. I would recommend this text to any person with even the most casual interest in literature, and for those who wish to immerse themselves with such authors and thought, I think this collection would be a perfect companion.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interview of Jorge Luis Borges pays for the entire book, October 2, 2008

By 

Judge J Drhedd - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Paris Review Interviews, I (Paperback)

The flow of that Borges interview is fascinating. It seems done really in one sitting... honest, and unedited--unlike the most of the others, where, even in the introduction it is admitted that the interviewee had intervened so much in the final draft, the interviewee sometimes become one more interviewer... the writer/subject is interviewing himself/herself. (in any case, thats why many writers are willing to sit down for a Paris Review interview... because they are promised to have the final say on the output, if they so wish. even if deadlines are disregarded).

Then next best is Hemingway's. Bristling machismo in some of the answers. You see irritation, willingness to participate, then irritation again.

Then Billy Wilder's. It's amazing to discover that while he has been retired for so long when interviewed, he still has the wit and can recall personal events like it's yesterday. Im wondering now why he hadnt made a film for decades, but was still very involved in Holywood. (I gather from the interview that he still has an office he gets to everyday until he died).

The rest are of equal good quality. While not remarkable in total, there is always a question that is answered uniquely and interestingly by the subject writer. I have to admit though that Im not familiar with a number of them, and I still have 7 more to read though as of this writing.

Yes, the interviews are available online, but for 10 USD, you also get a good quality paper (used in the book), designed to last long. Nothing beats reading, leafing through the pages, and smelling a brilliant book. :-)