Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews





Sixteen of the world's great women writers speak about their work, their colleagues, and their lives.

For More Than Forty Years, the acclaimed Paris Review interviews have been collected in the Writers at Work series. The Modern Library relaunches the series with the first of its specialized collections -- interviews with sixteen women novelists, poets, and playwrights, all offering rich commentary on the art of writing and on the opportunities and challenges a woman writer faces in contemporary society.

"The editors and interviewers of the Writers at Work series have become curators of live genius, marvelous literary taxidermists who have discovered a way to mount the great minds of their day without the usual killing and stuffing, to preserve them for all time. Surely this is now one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world, and one of our great national resources."

-- Joe David Bellamy,

Writing at the End of the Millennium

"Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review."

-- William Kennedy

"It is a safe bet that thirty and even three hundred years from now these conversations will be invaluable to students of twentieth-century literature."

-- Time"What is it about interviews that attracts us?" Margaret Atwood asks in her introduction to this collection of 16 interviews from The Paris Review. "Specifically, what is it about interviews with writers?" Women Writers at Work may not answer that question, but it raises many, many more--and allows the writers included in this volume to speak for themselves. For decades the Paris Review has been interviewing authors of both genders and every literary stripe, and many of these interviews have been collected together in volumes like this one. This, however, is the first time the Writers at Work series has dedicated itself to one gender only. In this volume readers will find insightful interviews with Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, Dorothy Parker, P.L. Travers, Simone de Beauvoir, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, Nadine Gordimer, Maya Angelou, Anne Sexton, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates.

The Paris Review is famous for getting authors to open up. The subjects here offer honest, often provocative opinions about themselves (Dorothy Parker on her humorous verses: "I read my verses now and I ain't funny. I haven't been funny for twenty years"); each other (Mary McCarthy on "women writers": "Katherine Anne Porter? Don't think she really is--I mean her writing is certainly very feminine, but I would say that there wasn't the 'WW' business in Katherine Anne Porter"); and writing itself (Toni Morrison: "What makes me feel I belong here, out in this world, is not the teacher, not the mother, not the lover but what goes on in my mind when I'm writing"). The end result is a fascinating glimpse into these writers' minds and works. --Margaret Prior









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