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"Novelists, American -- 20th century -- Interviews"
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Conversations with Percival Everett
For the first eighteen years of his career, Percival Everett (b.
1956) managed to fly under the radar of the literary establishment.
He followed his artistic vision down a variety of unconventional
paths, including his preference for releasing his books through
independent publishers. But with the publication of his novel
erasure in 2001, his literary talent could no longer be
kept under wraps. The author of more than twenty-five books,
Everett has established himself as one of America's-and arguably
the world's-premier twenty-first-century fiction writers. Among his
many honors since 2000 are Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards for
erasure and I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) and
three prominent awards for his 2005 novel Wounded -the PEN
Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, France's Prix Lucioles des
Libraires, and Italy's Premio Vallombrosa Gregor von Rezzori Prize.
Interviews collected in this volume-several of which appear in
print or in English translation for the first time-display
Everett's abundant wit as well as the independence of thought that
has led to his work being described as \"characteristically
uncharacteristic.\" At one moment he speaks with great
sophistication about the fact that African American authors are
forced to overcome constraining expectations about their subject
matter that white writers are not. And in the next he talks about
training mules or quips about \"Jim Crow,\" a pet bird Everett had on
his ranch outside Los Angeles. Everett discusses race and gender,
his ecological interests, the real and mythic American West, the
eclectic nature of his work, the craft of writing, language and
linguistic theory, and much more.
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Companion to James Welch's The heartsong of Charging Elk
\"Literary companion to James Welch's The Heartsong of Charging Elk that includes an unpublished chapter of \"The Marseille Grace,\" personal interviews with the author, an essay by the author's widow, and essays by leading scholars in the field\" -- Provided by publisher.
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Conversations with Ken Kesey
Ken Kesey (1935-2001) is the author of several works of well-known fiction and other hard-to-classify material. His debut novel,One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was a critical and commercial sensation that was followed soon after by his most substantial and ambitious book,Sometimes a Great Notion. His other books, includingDemon Box, Sailor Song, and two children's books, appeared amidst a life of astounding influence. He is maybe best known for his role as the charismatic and proto-hippie leader of the West Coast LSD movement that sparked \"The Sixties,\" as iconically recounted in Tom Wolfe'sThe Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
In the introduction to \"An Impolite Interview with Ken Kesey,\" Paul Krassner writes, \"For a man who says he doesn't like to do interviews, Kesey certainly does a lot of them.\" What's most surprising about this statement is not the incongruity between disliking and doing interviews but the idea that Kesey could possibly have been less than enthusiastic about being the center of attention. After his two great triumphs, writing played a lesser role in Kesey's life, but in thoughtful interviews he sometimes regrets the books that were sacrificed for the sake of his other pursuits. Interviews trace his arc through success, fame, prison, farming, and tragedy--the death of his son in a car accident profoundly altered his life. These conversations make clear Kesey's central place in American culture and offer his enduring lesson that the freedom exists to create lives as wildly as can be imagined.
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Conversations with Walter Mosley
The interviews in this collection cover Walter Mosley's career and reveal an overarching theme: a belief in the transformative power of reading and writing. Since the 1990 publication of his first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, Mosley (b. 1952) has published over thirty books in a tremendous range of genres and modes: crime and detective fiction, science fiction, literary novels of ideas, character studies, political and social nonfiction, erotica, and memoir. Best known for his Easy Rawlins detective series and Socrates Fortlow series of crime novels, Mosley has created a body of work that as a whole chronicles and examines twentieth-century African American experience.Conversations with Walter Mosley covers the breadth of Mosley's career and reveals a craftsman and wryly witty conversationalist. Conscious of his forebears as well as literary techniques, he discusses favorites and influences including Camus, Shakespeare, and Dickens as well as writers in popular genres, especially speculative fiction and the hard-boiled noir detective tradition. He also discusses how his work modifies the crime tradition to engage it with black experience.
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Novel Ideas
Novel Ideasprovides a substantial introduction to the elements of fiction followed by in-depth interviews with successful novelists who speak with candor and insight into the complex process by which a novel is made. This edition includes new and updated interviews as well as writing exercises to enhance its use in the writing classroom.
Dorothy Allison recalls \"deliciously self-indulgent\" days of writing in her bathrobe, wrapped in misery and exultation; Peter Cameron explains how he made the move from short fiction to the novel with the aid of a music composer's notebook to track the movement of his characters. Writers as different as Ha Jin, Jill McCorkle, Richard Ford, and Michael Chabon describe their unique approaches to their work while consistently affirming the necessity of committing to the hard effort of it while also remaining open to surprise.
Aspiring novelists will find hands-on strategies for beginning, working through, and revising a novel; accomplished novelists will discover new ways to solve the problems they face in process; and serious readers of contemporary fiction will enjoy a glimpse into the way novels are made.
Includes interviews with:
Dorothy AllisonLarry BrownPeter CameronMichael ChabonMichael CunninghamRobb Forman DewRichard FordHa JinPatricia HenleyCharles JohnsonWally LambValerie MartinJill McCorkleSena Jeter NaslundLewis NordanSheri ReynoldsS. J. RozanJane SmileyLee SmithTheodore Weesner
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Conversations with William Gibson
\"After reading Neuromancer for the first time,\" literary scholar Larry McCaffery wrote, \"I knew I had seen the future of [science fiction] (and maybe of literature in general), and its name was William Gibson.\" McCaffery was right. Gibson's 1984 debut is one of the most celebrated SF novels of the last half century, and in a career spanning more than three decades, the American Canadian science fiction writer and reluctant futurist responsible for introducing \"cyberspace\" into the lexicon has published nine other novels.
Editor Patrick A. Smith draws the twenty-three interviews in this collection from a variety of media and sources--print and online journals and fanzines, academic journals, newspapers, blogs, and podcasts. Myriad topics include Gibson's childhood in the American South and his early adulthood in Canada, with travel in Europe; his chafing against the traditional SF mold, the origins of \"cyberspace,\" and the unintended consequences (for both the author and society) of changing the way we think about technology; the writing process and the reader's role in a new kind of fiction. Gibson (b. 1948) takes on branding and fashion, celebrity culture, social networking, the post-9/11 world, future uses of technology, and the isolation and alienation engendered by new ways of solving old problems. The conversations also provide overviews of his novels, short fiction, and nonfiction.
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Conversations with Jerome Charyn
This volume of fourteen interviews covers the prolific and rich career of author Jerome Charyn (b. 1937). Four of the interviews appear in English for the first time, and two interviews appear here in print for the first time as well.
As one of his autobiographical volumes claims, Jerome Charyn is a “Bronx Boy,” a child born from immigrant parents who went through Ellis Island in the 1920s like so many other travelers without luggage, a “little werewolf” who grew up on his own in the chaos of the Bronx ghetto. “I think I was defined by two things: World War II and the movies.” His work remains deeply marked by this childhood largely forgotten by the American Dream. If Charyn has spent much of his life in Paris, he has paradoxically never left the Bronx: “‘El Bronx’ is there inside my head, and I revisit it the way Hemingway would fish the Big Two-Hearted River in his dreams.” His whole work is a long attempt at evoking his own history and celebrating his lifelong marveling at the power of language—“our second skin”—as well as his deep, unflinching belief in the promises of fiction.
Since 1964, Charyn has published more than fifty books ranging from fiction to nonfiction and including short stories; very popular crime novels; graphic novels cowritten with European artists; essays on American culture and cinema as well as on New York; autobiography; and biography—an ever-changing production that has made it difficult for critics to classify him. And yet in many ways Charyn's writing thrives on constant currents: the words “voice,” “song,” “undersong,” or “rhythm” return frequently in his interviews as he explains what literature is to him and ceaselessly asserts that he is trying “to find a music for a musicless world,” a language for “people who cannot speak.”
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Hear Us Out
The author of the acclaimed Gay Fiction Speaks brings us new interviews with twelve prominent gay writers who have emerged in the last decade. Hear Us Out demonstrates how in recent decades the canon of gay fiction has developed, diversified, and expanded its audience into the mainstream. Readers will recognize names like Michael Cunningham, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Hours inspired the hit movie; and others like Christopher Bram, Bernard Cooper, Stephen McCauley, and Matthew Stadler. These accounts explore the vicissitudes of writing on gay male themes in fiction over the last thirty years—prejudices of the literary marketplace; social and political questions; the impact of AIDS; commonalities between gay male and lesbian fiction... and even some delectable bits of gossip.
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Companion to James Welch's The Heartsong of Charging Elk
James Welch was one of the central figures in twentieth-century American Indian literature, andThe Heartsong of Charging Elkis of particular importance as the culminating novel in his canon. A historical novel,Heartsongfollows a Lakota (Sioux) man at the end of the nineteenth century as he travels with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show; is left behind in Marseille, France; and then struggles to overcome many hardships, including a charge for murder. In this novel Welch conveys some of the lifeways and language of a traditional Sioux.
Here for the first time is a literary companion to James Welch'sHeartsongthat includes an unpublished chapter of the first draft of the novel; selections from interviews with the author; a memoir by the author's widow, Lois Welch; and essays by leading scholars in the field on a wide range of topics. The rich resources presented here make this volume an essential addition to the study of James Welch and twentieth-century Native American literature.
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