"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."The Paris Review Interviews are the leanest and most substantial collection of pieces about writing that I know. And I'm a bit addicted to literary criticism. My blogroll links to the sixteen most interesting websites about books that I've found (so far - your suggestions are welcome), and The Paris Review Interviews are worth as much to me as half a dozen of the other sites.
- Ernest Hemingway
If you click on that link, you'll find more than 300 interviews with the best writers of the last 60 years, inquiring into the craft, methods and history of their creations. It's a bit like an Inside the Actors Studio for writers. You should go check out the website. If you don't have time to peruse it now, then bookmark it for later.
To give you a sense of the cornucopia of literary insight that awaits you, the site contains, among others, interviews with Achebe, Amis, Angelou, Ashberry, Atwood, Auden, Baldwin, Barnes, Beattie, Bellow, Bishop, Boll, Borges, Bradbury, Byatt, Calvino, Carver, Cheever, Delany, DeLillo, Didion, Dinesen, Eco, Eliot (T.S., not George - I did say the last 60 years), (Easton) Ellis, Ellison, Erdrich, Eugenides, Forster, Franzen, Frost, Garcia Marquez, Gibson, Gordimer, Greene, Hazzard, Heller, Hellman, Hollinghurst, Huxley, Ionesco, Ishiguro, P.D. James, Jin, Kerouac, King, Kundera, Kushner, le Carré, Lebowitz, Lessing, Lethem, Levi, (Vargas) Llosa, Mahfouz, McCarthy, McEwan, Mitchell, Moore (Lorrie & Marianne), Morrison, Murakami, Murdoch, Nabokov, Neruda, (Carol) Oates, Oe, Pamuk, Parker, Pinter, (Anne) Porter, Pound, Rhys, Roth, Rushdie, Sagan, Saramago, (Bashevis) Singer, Sondheim, Sontag, Steinbeck, S. Thompson, Thurber, Updike, Vonnegut, Walcott, Waugh, Welty, Winterson, Wodehouse and Yourcenar. You can search authors by decade of interview, or alphabetically. If you only search alphabetically, some of the most recent interviews don't appear.
Today we'll be looking at some thoughts from a great writer of the 20th Century. I've read 50 of The Paris Review Interviews so far, and this is one of the best. If you want to read the whole Hemingway interview, you know where to find it.