Bücher der Reihe Literary Conversations Series

In this collection of interviews Maxine Hong Kingston talks about her life, her writing, and her objectives. As she answers her critics and readers, she both clarifies the differences and exults in the difficulties of distinguishing between the remembered and the re-created.

Features interviews with one of the most celebrated science-fiction authors of the last 50 years. This book draws together 23 interviews from a variety of media and sources - print and online journals and fanzines, academic journals, newspapers, blogs, and podcasts.

The interviews and conversations contained in this volume derive from four decades of Stanley Kunitz's distinguished career. They touch on aesthetic motifs in his poetry, the roots of his work, his friendships in the sister arts of painting and sculpture, his interactions with Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke, and his comments on a host of poets.

The author of more than twenty-five books, Percival Everett has established himself as one of America's - and arguably the world's - premier twenty-first-century fiction writers. Interviews collected in this volume display Everett's abundant wit as well as the independence of thought that has led to his work's being described as "characteristically uncharacteristic".

United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey describes her mode as elegiac. The interviews featured in Conversations with Natasha Trethewey provide intriguing artistic and biographical insights into her work. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet cites diverse influences, from Anne Frank to Seamus Heaney.

To read these interviews given between 1969 and 1996 is to gain insights into William Kennedy's high seriousness in pursuing the craft of fiction and to witness the artistic growth of this remarkable writer. The interviews in this collection reveal how the opportunities and challenges in Kennedy's writing life parallel those other contemporary writers have faced in the last years of the century.

During the three decades since the Sunday Times trumpeted North Toward Home as "the finest evocation of an American boyhood since Mark Twain", Willie Morris (1934-1999) wrote seventeen other books. Conversations with Willie Morris collects twenty-five fascinating and incisive conversations with a man who confronted the turbulent issues of his generation.

Captures the imagination and philosophical acumen of one of America's most important aestheticians, critical theorists, fiction writers, and essayists. In interviews, in profiles, and in his own essays, Gass does not hide from questions about his art and personal motivations, no matter how frequently they are asked, nor does he toy with his interviewers.

How does a girl from Grundy, Virginia, become a successful writer? The interviews and profiles in Conversations with Lee Smith tell the story of one woman's discovery of her coal-mining hometown as a potential "literary place". In this first book of interviews with Smith, she revels in character and sense of place as cornerstones to her art.

In 1972 Rudolfo Anaya made a quiet entry into American literature with the publication of Bless Me, Ultima. In this collection of interviews Anaya talks about his life and about how New Mexico, his home state, influences his work. The interviews explore also the importance that myths and spiritual matters play in his writings.

Orally or on the page, John Edgar Wideman never seems to stray far from firsthand experience. "Writing for me is a way of opening up," he states in one of the interviews in this collection. This book spans thirty-five years. Wideman discusses a wide variety of topics - from postmodernism to genocide, from fatherhood to women's basketball.

The interviews in this collection will convince the reader that Jerzy Kosinski's public persona was one of the greatest creations. Few authors were ever more adept at press interviews. For Kosinski, the author of nine novels, the interview was part performance, part public relations, part blind date.

This collection of interviews from three decades features one of the South's most prominent contemporary writers, one of America's most dazzling practitioners of postmodern fiction. These conversations with Ellen Douglas reveal her earthy frankness and her disdain for "portentous declaration".

In interviews ranging from 1979 to 2004, Ann Beattie discusses her evolving craft, resists the labels placed on her, and articulates her vision of contemporary life. She frequently notes the connection between her prose style and methods of photography, commenting that she intends for her stories and novels to capture scenes and small slices of life rather than broad overviews.

In addition to detailed discussions of all of Tim O'Brien's work, the sixteen interviews and profiles in Conversations with Tim O'Brien explore common themes, with subtle differences. Looming large is the experience of Vietnam and its influence as well as O'Brien's youth in Minnesota and the expectations of a Midwestern upbringing.

In this collection of thirty interviews compiled by John Cheever's biographer, Cheever moves from gentlemanly reticence in the early pieces to forthright commentary upon a variety of subjects in the later ones. This admirably articulate author gives answers that are satisfying to the curious, though the expression of his views is very much under his control.

Interviews with the author of Catch-22

Grace Paley's contribution to American literature, while comparatively small in volume, has been substantial in impact. With a voice very much her own, Paley has been a critical force in post-World War II American culture, particularly at its controversial centers. In this collection of interviews from 1978 to 1995 Paley elaborates on the many forces that have influenced her and her writing.

Collects thirty-eight interviews, public speeches, and remarks that span five decades of the esteemed novelist and New Yorker editor's career. The interviews collectively address the entirety of Maxwell's literary work, with in-depth discussion of his short stories, essays, and novels.

Collects nineteen interviews, conducted over the past two decades on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, with the author of Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day. The interviews collectively address the entirety of this literary artist's career, affording readers of Ishiguro the most vivid portrait yet of contexts and influences behind his novels.

Margaret Walker began her writing career as a poet in the late 1930s. But she was cast into the limelight in 1966 when her novel Jubilee was published to wide critical and commercial acclaim. In interviews ranging from 1972 to 1996, this collection captures Walker's voice as she discusses an incredibly wide range of interests.

In these more than twenty interviews dating from 1952 to the present, Paul Bowles gives a variety of answers that reveal as much as they conceal. Too gracious to refuse interviews, he regards inquiries with the same clear-eyed detachment that marks his prose.

Paule Marshall is a major contributor to the canons of African American and Caribbean American literature. Over the course of her fifty-year career, Marshall has published five novels, two collections of short stories, numerous essays, and a memoir. This is the first collection of her interviews, and provides the first comprehensive account of the stages of this writer's life.

Gary Snyder is one of the most distinguished American poets, remarkable both for his long and productive career and for his equal contributions to literature and environmental thought. This volume collects interviews from 1961 to 2015 and charts his developing environmental philosophy and his wide-ranging interests in ecology, Buddhism, Native American studies, history, and mythology.

Paul Auster (b. 1947) is one of the most critically acclaimed and intensely studied authors in America today. His varied career as a novelist, poet, translator, and filmmaker has attracted scholarly scrutiny from a variety of critical perspectives. This volume - the first of its kind on Auster - provides penetrating self-analysis and a range of biographical information and critical commentary.

If Russell Banks (b. 1940) says he doesn't "think about [his] reader at all when [he's] writing," he clearly enjoys talking with his actual readers. These conversations span a period of over thirty years, from 1976 with the publication of his first novel, Family Life, and his first collection of short stories, to 2008 with The Reserve.

Sherman Alexie (b. 1966) gained national attention upon release of The Business of Fancydancing, his first collection of poems, in 1992. In Conversations with Sherman Alexie, the writer displays the same passion, dynamic sense of humour, and sharp observational skills that characterize his work.