*The Paris Review* Writers' Interview Series

[Prestidigitweeze]

Is everyone here familiar with The Paris Review Writers' Interview series? The interviewers and subjects are both writers, and the interviews themselves usually involve discussions of methods, process, output, editing, and other matters of interest to aspiring and seasoned language wranglers. Fiction writers are most prevalent, but poets, nonfiction writers, essayists and "humorists" (though S.J. Perelman prefers humorous writers) are included.

The interviews were first published in the magazine and then used to be collected and sold in volumes (my family owned the first four and I grew up reading and sometimes memorizing them).

Now, of course, many of those same interviews and several newer ones are available for free on line:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews

If you don't know this series, I urge you to visit this archive. If you knew it already, then you also know why I'm recommending it.

If some of your favorite writers from the past sixty years aren't represented, I'll be amazed.

[kennyc]

Yes these are wonderful!

Just read the Samuel R. Delaney one. Excellent!

http://www.theparisreview.org/interv...amuel-r-delany

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Yes these are wonderful!

Just read the Samuel R. Delaney one. Excellent!

http://www.theparisreview.org/interv...amuel-r-delany

That's a great interview! But don't stop there -- you'll even find interviews with writers like Hemingway and Nabokov (the latter writer being one of Samuel Delany's heroes).

I think of Sam (or Chip, as he's often called) as a friend, but so did the street booksellers with whom I sometimes used to see him on St. Mark's Place. Being friendly to people in the community seems to be a moral decision on his part, and one that he takes seriously.

If you lived in New York, I'd invite you to a reading we're doing with Chip at an art gallery in December -- a gallery which is also the home of the sightless and benevolent writer who runs it, an elderly statesman of the Lower East Side who has helped more younger writers in his lifetime than there are names for Allah.

[kennyc]

Yes ive read many of them already. Ive posted a thread or two to them in the past. Id love to be there for that reading. Dhalgren is one of the few books ive read many times.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Same here! I read that book as a kid along with J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition and never truly stopped reading either one.

PM me and I'll send you a link to the missing chapter (which will be featured on line in my magazine's next issue) from Chip's latest novel, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders.

To anyone else who might be reading this thread:

Whether or not you've read and like Delany, have a look at the other interviews! I'll be amazed if you don't find ones with the authors you love -- even the authors you've been reading all your life.

[caleb72]

Bookmarked. Thanks for that.

[djulian]

These are phenomenal. I'm a huge fan of John Gardner, so his interview was a treat.

As an added recommendation, I've been sending these to my e-reader using Readability; I think I've plowed through twenty or more in a week.

[kennyc]

Was just looking up some William Trevor info and ran across his interview with the Paris Review:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interv...william-trevor

[Prestidigitweeze]

And now you know you needn't stop with Trevor!

Whenever I need to study a given writer, whether it's to interact with and/or learn from them, I always read their interview in PR. At this point, I can quote the ones with Nabokov, T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Marianne Moore, Lillian Hellman, Hemingway and so many others I read as a kid. The fact the magazine continued to interview great writers long after I grew up makes it a seemingly endless resource.

Speaking of interview resources, here's another one:

The great small press, Dalkey Archives and its backlog of interviews from The Review of Contemporary Fiction.

Even if some of the writers aren't familiar to you, others will be, and you might like the ones you don't recognize as well.

(Now if only Pynch were the person who created their ebooks!)