The Paris Review Interviews : Volume 3

Introduction by Margaret Atwood

From Salman Rushdie's daring rhetorical question "why shouldn't literature provoke?" to Carol Joyce Oates's thrilling comments about her own prolific output, the Paris Review has elicited revelatory and revealing thoughts from our most accomplished novelists, poets and playwrights. How did Georges Simenon manage to write around six books a year? What was it like for Jan Morris to write as both a man and a woman? What influences moved Ralph Ellison to write Invisible Man?

In the pages of the Paris Review, writers give more than simple answers; they offer uncommon candour, depth and wit in interviews that have become the gold standard of the literary Q & A.

The interviews:
Ralph Ellison (1955)
Georges Simenon (1955)
Isak Dineson (1956)
Evelyn Waugh (1963)
William Carlos Williams (1964)
Harold Pinter (1966)
John Cheever (1976)
Joyce Carol Oates (1978)
Jean Rhys (1979)
Raymond Carver (1983)
Chinua Achebe (1994)
Ted Hughes (1995)
Jan Morris (1997)
Martin Amis (1998)
Salman Rushdie (2005)
Norman Mailer (2007)

Praise for The Paris Review Interviews:

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 on your couch.'

Dave Eggers

'If you only want to get acquainted with your avourite writer, you could go to a reading or a book-signing. But to really know them, you should read a Paris Review interview.'

The Times