Literary Conversations Series – serie

One of so many talents could only be expected to talk superbly, too. Here in over two dozen interviews is the voice of Maya Angelou (1928-2014) telling with strength, warmth, honesty, and dignified pride of her impact upon a difficult world and ultimately of her triumph.She has written poetry and a stream of dynamic autobiographies that include I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Gather Together in My Name; Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas; and Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well.In Conversations with Maya Angelou she spreads out the facts of her remarkable history for our examination and in sharing these conveys a salubrious philosophy and a zest for life.

Conversations with Nadine Gordimer edited by Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour Nadine Gordimer is one of the contemporary world's most admired writers of novels and short stories. This volume collects three decades of her interviews. In them she presents her attitudes toward her art and its interconnection with the oppressive, volatile politics in her native land. She has traveled extensively to other countries only to discover that no matter how white her skin she is indeed African and the only country she can call home is South Africa. "If you write honestly about life in South Africa, apartheid damns itself," she says. She is ruthlessly honest, and her fiction has played the vital role of communicating in detail to the rest of the world the effects of apartheid upon the daily lives of the South African people. To maintain her integrity, she writes as though she "were dead," without any thought of how anyone will react to what she has written. She remains heroically undaunted both by the banning of three of her novels by the white government and by the protests of radical blacks who assert that whites cannot write convincingly about blacks.She is concerned neither with the image of blacks nor with the image of whites, only with revealing the complexity, the full truth. This truth condemns the racism upon which apartheid is built. In her nine novels and eight volumes of short stories, Gordimer digs deeper and deeper until she has "thematic layers." These include "betrayal-political, sexual, every form" and "power, the way human beings use power in their relationships." Her accounts in these interviews of how she works and of which writers she admires will fascinate readers, scholars, teachers, and students alike. Co-editors Nancy Topping Bazin retired from the faculty of the English and women's studies departments at Old Dominion University, and Marilyn Dallman Seymour retired from the staff of the Government Publications Department of the Old Dominion University Library.

Known today primarily as the author of Our Town, probably America's most beloved and widely produced play, Thornton Wilder is the only writer ever to be honored with Pulitzer Prizes in both fiction and drama. This collection of interviews with Wilder covers the full range of his sixty-year career as one of America's leading men of letters. In addition to American interviews, this book includes translations of interviews published originally in French and German that have never appeared in English previously. It includes a transcription of a rare radio interview conducted by Rex Stout and an extensive Paris Review conversation between Wilder and Richard H. Goldston, his first biographer. Throughout this book is a sense of Wilder's boundless curiosity, his wit, his unflagging energy, his friendships with a range of celebrities such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Gene Tunney, and above all, the multitude of subjects on which he conversed easily and brilliantly. Conversations with Thornton Wilder provides a close-up encounter with Wilder as novelist, playwright, actor, director, teacher, scholar, world traveler, musician, raconteur, and friend of the famous. The earliest interview included was given in 1928, when his most acclaimed and commercially successful novel, The Bridge at San Luis Rey, won him his first Pulitzer Prize. From the 1930s and 1940s come Wilder's comments on his two celebrated plays, Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, both Pulitzer winners. In the last three decades of his life, Wilder returned to the novel form (The Eighth Day won the National Book Award) while continuing to write plays and to give his opinions on theater-in-the-round, the hippie movement, movies and television, and Communism.

For the past forty years, Paul Bowles has answered questions about the autobiographical references in his novels (The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down, The Spider's House, and Up Above the World) and about his work as a composer in New York, all the time insisting, ""I don't want anyone to know about me.""In these more than twenty interviews dating from 1952 to the present, 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, wondering, ""Why is it that Americans expect an artist's work to be a reflection of his life? They never seem to want to believe that the two can be independent of each other and go their separate ways."" Despite his reticence, Bowles frankly discusses his ""unconscious"" writing practice, his views on the ""illiterate imagination,"" existentialism, his various experiments with altered states of consciousness, and nearly fifty years of expatriate life in Morocco.Included are three interviews never before published, several interviews that originally appeared in now obscure journals, plus interviews by Jay Mclnerny for Vanity Fair, Jeffrey Bailey for The Paris Review, and Michael Rogers for Rolling Stone.

Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, the most prominent writers of Native American descent, collaborate on all their works. In these interviews, conducted both separately and jointly, they discuss how their writing moves from conception to completion and how The Beet Queen, Tracks, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, and The Crown of Columbus have been enhanced by both their artistic and their matrimonial union.Being of mixed blood and having lived in both white and Native American worlds, they give an original perspective on American society. Sometimes with humor and always with refreshing candor, their discussions undermine the damaging stereotypes of Native Americans. Some of the interviews focus on their nonfiction book, The Broken Cord, which recounts the struggle to solve their adopted son's health problems from fetal alcohol syndrome. Included are two recent interviews published here for the first time. In this collection, Erdrich and Dorris tell why they have chosen to write about many varying subjects and of why they refuse to be imprisoned in a literary ghetto of writers whose only subjects are Native Americans.

James Salter (1925-2015) has been known throughout his career as a ""writer's writer,"" acclaimed by such literary greats as Susan Sontag, Richard Ford, John Banville, and Peter Matthiessen for his lyrical prose, his insightful and daring explorations of sex, and his examinations of the inner lives of women and men.Conversations with James Salter collects interviews published from 1972 to 2014 with the award-winning author of The Hunters, A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years, and All That Is. Gathered here are his earliest interviews following acclaimed but moderately selling novels, conversations covering his work as a screenwriter and award-winning director, and interviews charting his explosive popularity after publishing All That Is, his first novel after a gap of thirty-four years. These conversations chart Salter's progression as a writer, his love affair with France, his military past as a fighter pilot, and his lyrical explorations of gender relations.The collection contains interviews from Sweden, France, and Argentina appearing for the first time in English. Included as well are published conversations from the United States, Canada, and Australia, some of which are significantly extended versions, giving this collection an international scope of Salter's wide-ranging career and his place in world literature.

Between 1972 and 2001, Barry Hannah (1942-2010) published eight novels and four collections of short stories. A master of short fiction, Hannah is considered by many to be one of the most important writers of modern American literature. His writing is often praised more for its unflinching use of language, rich metaphors, and tragically damaged characters than for plot. ""I am doomed to be a more lengthy fragmentist,"" he once claimed. ""In my thoughts, I don't ever come on to plot in a straightforward way.""Conversations with Barry Hannah collects interviews published between 1980 and 2010. Within them Hannah engages interviewers in discussions on war and violence, masculinity, religious faith, abandoned and unfinished writing projects, the modern South and his time spent away from it, the South's obsession with defeat, the value of teaching writing, and post-Faulknerian literature. Despite his rejection of the label ""southern writer,"" Hannah's work has often been compared to that of fellow Mississippian William Faulkner, particularly for each author's use of dark humor and the Southern Gothic tradition in their work. Notwithstanding these comparisons, Hannah's voice is distinctly and undeniably his own, a linguistic tour de force.

Conversations with Sterling Plumpp is the first collection of interviews with the renowned poet of Home/Bass and other much-admired works. Spanning thirty years and drawn from literary and scholarly journals and other media, these interviews offer insights into his poetic innovation of blues and jazz and his mastery of black vernacular in poetry. This collection seems fundamental to an understanding of the life and work of an African American poet who has been innovative in fusing blues and jazz rhythms with poetic insight and in vivifying the vernacular landscape of African American poetry.Born in 1940 in Clinton, Mississippi, Plumpp has been living in Chicago since 1962. Home/Bass received the 2014 American Book Award. The finest blues poet of his generation, Plumpp became a model for contemporary poetry and poetics and a leading figure in the tradition of blues/jazz poetry. He continues to reinvent the language while exploring the registers of individual and communal memory, local, national, and global history. His poetry is important in attempts to define the black aesthetic from the era of the Harlem Renaissance to the seminal Black Arts Movement. It is also important for its re-articulation of the Great Migration, especially expressed by blues musicians who left Mississippi for Chicago.

Over three decades, celebrated fiction writer Andre Dubus (1936-1999) published seven collections of short stories, two collections of essays, two collections of previously published stories, two novels, and a novella. While this is an impressive publishing record for any writer, for Dubus, who suffered a near-fatal accident mid-career, it is near miraculous. Just after midnight on July 23, 1986, after stopping to assist two stranded motorists, Dubus was struck by a car. His right leg was crushed and his left leg had to be amputated above the knee. After months of hospital stays and surgeries, he would suffer chronic pain for the rest of his life. However, when he gave his first interview after the accident, his deepest fear was that he would never write again.This collection of interviews traces his career beginning in 1967 with the publication of his novel The Lieutenant, to his final interview given right before his death February 24, 1999. In between are conversations that focus on his shift to essay writing during his long recovery period as well as those that celebrate his return to fiction with the publication of ""The Colonel's Wife,"" in 1993. Dubus would share as well stories surrounding his Louisiana childhood, his three marriages, the writers who influenced him, and his deep Catholic faith.

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) stands out as one of the most respected, influential authors of the twentieth century. Though primarily known as a children's book writer and illustrator, he did not limit himself to these areas. He saw himself first and foremost as an artist. In this collection of interviews - the first of its kind - Sendak presents himself as a writer, illustrator, set designer, and librettist. From his early work with Randall Jarrell and Ruth Krauss through his later work with Tony Kushner and Spike Jonze, Sendak worked as a collaborator with a passion for the arts.The interviews here, many of which are hard to find or previously unpublished, span from 1966 through 2011. They show not only Sendak's shifting artistic interests, but also changes in how he understood himself and his craft. What emerges is a portrait of an author and an artist who was alternately solemn and playful, congenial and irascible, sophisticated and populist. The man who showed millions of children and adults alike what's cooking in the night kitchen and where the wild things are, Sendak remains an American original who redefined the picture book and changed children's literature - and its readers - forever.

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) stands out as one of the most respected, influential authors of the twentieth century. Though primarily known as a children's book writer and illustrator, he did not limit himself to these areas. He saw himself first and foremost as an artist. In this collection of interviews, Sendak presents himself as a writer, illustrator, set designer, and librettist. From his early work with Randall Jarrell and Ruth Krauss through his later work with Tony Kushner and Spike Jonze, Sendak worked as a collaborator with a passion for the arts.The interviews here, many of which are hard to find or previously unpublished, span from 1966 through 2011. They show not only Sendak's shifting artistic interests, but also changes in how he understood himself and his craft. What emerges is a portrait of an author and an artist who was alternately solemn and playful, congenial and irascible, sophisticated and populist. The man who showed millions of children and adults alike what's cooking in the night kitchen and where the wild things are, Sendak remains an American original who redefined the picture book and changed children's literature-and its readers-forever.

Ever since A Hall of Mirrors depicted the wild side of New Orleans in the 1960s, Robert Stone (1937-2015) has situated novels where America has shattered and the action is at a pitch. In Dog Soldiers, he covered the Vietnam War and drug smuggling. A Flag for Sunrise captured revolutionary discontent in Central America. Children of Light exposed the crass values of Hollywood. Outerbridge Reach depicted how existential angst can lead to a longing for heroic transcendence. The clash of religions in Jerusalem drove Damascus Gate. Traditional town-gown tensions amid twenty-first-century culture wars propelled Death of the Black-Haired Girl.Stone's reputation rests on his mastery of the craft of fiction. These interviews are replete with insights about the creative process as he responds with disarming honesty to probing questions about his major works. Stone also has fascinating things to say about his remarkable life - a schizophrenic mother, a stint in the navy, his involvement with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, and his presence at the creation of the counterculture. From the publication of A Hall of Mirrors until his death in 2015, Stone was a major figure in American literature.

Since the publication of Serena in 2008 earned him a nomination for the PEN/Faulkner fiction prize, Ron Rash (b. 1953) has gained attention as one of the South's finest writers. Rash draws upon his family's history in Appalachia, where most members have worked with their hands as farmers or millworkers. In the Grit Lit or Rough South genre, Rash maintains a prominent place as a skilled craftsman and triple threat, publishing four collections of poetry, six short story collections, and six novels. Though best known as an Appalachian writer, Rash's reach has grown to extend well beyond Appalachia and the American South, spreading to an international audience.Conversations with Ron Rash collects twenty-two interviews with the award-winning author and provides a look into Rash's writing career from his first collection of short stories, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth in 1994 through his 2015 novel, Above the Waterfall. The collection includes four interviews from outside the United States, two of which appear in English for the first time. Spanning sixteen years, these interviews demonstrate the disciplined writing process of an expert writer, Rash's views of literature on a local and a global scale, his profound respect for the craft of the written word, and his ongoing goal to connect with his readers.

He again tops the crowd - he surpasses himself, the old iron brought to the white heat of simplicity."" That's what Robert Lowell said of the poetry of Stanley Kunitz (1905-2006) and his evolving artistry. The interviews and conversations contained in this volume derive from four decades of 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 Lowell and Theodore Roethke, and his comments on a host of poets: John Keats, Walt Whitman, Randall Jarrell, Wallace Stevens, and Anna Akhmatova.Kunitz emerged from a mid-sized industrial town in central Massachusetts, surviving family tragedy and a sense of personal isolation and loneliness, to become an eloquent spokesman for poetry and for the power of the human imagination. Kunitz has commented, ""If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we must turn."" His own odyssey from ""metaphysical loneliness"" to a sense of community with fellow writers and artists - by building institutions like Poets House and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts - is ever present in these interviews.

Since the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, launched him to fame, Michael Chabon (b. 1963) has become one of contemporary literature's most acclaimed novelists by pursuing his singular vision across all boundaries of genre and medium. A firm believer that reading even the most challenging literature should be a fundamentally pleasurable experience, Chabon has produced an astonishingly diverse body of work that includes detective novels, weird tales of horror, alternate history science fiction, and rollicking chronicles of swashbuckling adventure alongside tender coming-of-age stories, sprawling social novels, and narratives of intense introspection. Uniting them all is Chabon's utterly distinct prose style - exuberant and graceful, sometimes ironic but never cynical. His work has earned accolades ranging from the Pulitzer Prize to science fiction's Hugo and Nebula Awards. Conversations with Michael Chabon collects eighteen revealing interviews with the renowned author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and other much-admired works. Spanning nearly twenty years and drawn from science fiction fan magazines and literary journals alike, these interviews shed new light on the central concerns of Chabon's fiction, including the importance of dismantling the false divide between literary and lowbrow, his evolving relationship to Jewish culture and literature, the unique properties of male friendship, and the complexities of race in contemporary America. These interviews are essential reading for anyone seeking a better understanding of the life and work of an author who has been instrumental in defining the landscape of contemporary American fiction.

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.

This volume brings together candid, revealing interviews with one of the twentieth century’s master prose writers. Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) was a Russian American scientist, poet, translator, and professor of literature. Critics throughout the world celebrated him for developing the luminous and enigmatic style which advanced the boundaries of modern literature more than any author since James Joyce. In a career that spanned over six decades, he produced dozens of iconic works, including Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and his classic autobiography, Speak, Memory.The twenty-eight interviews and profiles in this collection weredrawn from Nabokov’s numerous print and broadcast appearances over a period of nineteen years. Beginning with the controversy surrounding the American publication of Lolita in 1958, he offers trenchant, witty views on society, literature, education, the role of the author, and a range of other topics. He discusses the numerousliterary and symbolic allusions in his work, his use of parody and satire, as well as analyses of his own literary influences.Nabokov also provided a detailed portrait of his life—from his aristocratic childhood in pre-revolutionary Russia, education at Cambridge, apprenticeship as an émigré writer in the capitals of Europe, to his decision in 1940 to immigrate to the United States, where he achieved renown and garnered an international readership. The interviews in this collection are essential for seeking aclearer understanding of the life and work of an author who was pivotal in shaping the landscape of contemporary fiction.

Gary Snyder (b. 1930) 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. His childhood in the Pacific Northwest profoundly shaped his sensibility due to his contact with Native American culture and his early awareness of the destruction of the environment by corporations. Although he emerged from the San Francisco Renaissance with writers such as Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, and William Everson, he became associated with the Beats due to his friendships with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who included a portrait of Snyder as Japhy Ryder in his novel The Dharma Bums. After graduating from Reed College, Snyder became deeply involved with Zen Buddhism, and he spent twelve years in Japan immersed in study.Conversations with Gary Snyder 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. The book also demonstrates the ways Snyder has returned throughout his career to key ideas such as the extended family, shamanism, poetics, visionary experience, and caring for the environment as well as his relationship to the Beat movement. Because the book contains interviews spanning more than fifty years, the reader witnesses how Snyder has evolved and grown both as a poet and philosopher of humanity’s proper relationship to the cosmos while remaining committed to the issues that preoccupied him as a young man.

This volume sheds a much-needed light on Edwidge Danticat (b. 1969) and her ability to depict timely issues in sparkling prose that delves deep into the borderlands, an uncharted in-between space located outside fixed geographic, cultural, and ideological bounds. Prevalent throughout many interviews here is Danticat’s expressed determination not only to reveal Haitian immigrant experience, but also to make that nuanced culture and its vibrant traditions accessible to a wide audience.These interviews coincide with Edwidge Danticat’s evolving artistic vision, her steady book publication, and her expanding roles as fiction writer, essayist, memoirist, documentarian, young adult book author, editor, songwriter, cultural critic, and political commentator. Dating from her appearance on the literary scene at the age of twenty-five, the many interviews that she has granted attest to not only her productivity, but also her accessibility to scholars, teachers, writers, and journalists eager for knowledgeabout her vision. Included in this volume are interviews that range from 2000, covering the publication of her debut work of fiction, Breath, Eyes, Memory, to a personal interview conducted with the volume editor in 2016. In that conversation, which appears for the first time as part of this collection, Danticat provides insight intolittle-known aspects of her life, art, and politics.Her candid interviews carry out a careful stripping away of preconceived notions of Danticat, disclosing the private and public life of a first-class writer and intellectual whose countless achievements have assured her an enduring place within contemporary world letters.

Conversations with Colum McCann brings together eighteen interviews with a world-renowned fiction writer. Ranging from his 1994 literary debut, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, to a new and unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews represent the development as well as the continuation of McCann’s interests. The number and length of the later conversations attest to his star-power. Let the Great World Spin earned him the National Book Award and promises to become a major motion picture. His most recent novel, TransAtlantic, has awed readers with its dynamic yoking of the 1845–46 visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland, the 1919 first nonstop transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown, and Senator George Mitchell’s 1998 efforts to achieve a peace accord inNorthern Ireland. An extensive interview by scholar Cécile Maudet is included here, as is an interview by John Cusatis, who wrote Understanding Colum McCann, the first extensive critical analysisof McCann’s work.An author who actually enjoys talking about his work, McCann (b. 1965) offers insights into his method of writing, what he hopes to achieve, as well the challenge of writing each novel to go beyond his accomplishments in the novel before. Readers will note how many of his responses include stories in which hehimself is the object of the humor and how often his remarks reveal insights into his character as a man who sees the grittiness of the urban landscape but never loses faith in the strength of ordinary people and their capacity to prevail.

Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara reveals an artist and activist whose work deftly negotiates boundaries of feminism, nationalism, and film. The intimacy of these collaborations or conversations between Bambara (1939-1995) and her interviewers provides an excellent and necessary resource for those interested in scholarly approaches to her fiction, especially her novels The Salt Eaters and the posthumously published Those Bones Are Not My Child, and her acclaimed short story collection Gorilla, My Love. The collection reveals the passion, humor, and real-life experiences of the woman who through her editing of the groundbreaking anthology of black women’s writing The Black Woman and contributions to the documentary W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography in Four Voices changed perceptions of African American culture in the modern era.The interviews present a woman who saw herself as “a teacher who writes, a social worker who writes, a youth worker who writes, a mother who writes.” Bambara viewed herself as a cultural worker for oppressed people whose job as an artist was making, in her words, “revolution irresistible.” Indeed, her fiction champions the working class and “average folk,” both of whom she felt were made invisible by mainstream American society.The volume also displays Bambara’s passionate criticism of radicalism and revolutionary philosophies that were structured by patriarchal, sexist, and heterosexual-centric paradigms. Her willingness to challenge her own ideals, as well as those that conflicted with them, marks her as one of the most forceful black writers of her era.

Conversations with Edmund White brings together twenty-one interviews with an author known for chronicling gay culture. Ranging from a 1982 discussion of his early works to a new and unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews highlight White’s predilections, his major achievements, and the pivotal moments of his long, varied career.Since the 1973 publication of his first novel, Forgetting Elena, Edmund White (b. 1940) has become a major figure in literature and gay culture. White is, however, more than just a celebrated gay writer. He is an international man of letters, and his work crosses several genres. White’s fiction includes an autobiographical trilogy—A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony—along with more recent novels such as Jack Holmes and His Friend and Our Young Man. White’s love of French literature and culture is evident in biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud, and his antipathy to American Puritanism suffuses his collected essays and memoirs and is on full display in two early nonfiction works that helped define the era of gay liberation: The Joy of Gay Sex, coauthored with Charles Silverstein, and States of Desire: Travels in Gay America.A professor of creative writing at Princeton University, White has earned many distinctions, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Pioneer Award. White has been a generous interviewer, sharing his time and insights not only with major publications such as the Paris Review, but also with smaller online publications for more limited audiences. A lively commentator, White has never been afraid to speak his mind, even when the result has been public feuds with literary peers on both sides of the Atlantic.

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.

Conversations with Will D. Campbell is the first collection of interviews with the southern preacher, activist, and author best known for his involvement with the civil rights movement. Ranging from a 1971 discussion about religion and ending with a previously unpublished interview conducted in 2009, these twelve interviews give insight to Campbell's unique religious beliefs and highlight pivotal moments of his career.Will D. Campbell (1924-2013) was born poor in rural Mississippi and became an ordained minister when he was barely seventeen years old. After serving in the Army during World War II, Campbell ministered in a variety of positions, including a pastorate in Louisiana, as religious director at the University of Mississippi, and as a race relations consultant for the National Council of Churches. Along the way, Campbell worked with civil rights figures, Klansmen, Black Panthers, and country music icons, believing all were equal in the eyes of God. Throughout his career, Campbell drew attention for criticizing the institutional churches and supporting women's rights, gay rights, and school desegregation.From 1962 through 2012, Campbell published over fifteen books including novels, biographies, and memoirs. His first book, Race and the Renewal of the Church, introduced his theories of reconciliation and the failures of institutional churches. His best-known work, Brother to a Dragonfly, was a National Book Award finalist.

Conversations with Edmund White brings together twenty-one interviews with an author known for chronicling gay culture. Ranging from a 1982 discussion of his early works to a new and unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews highlight White’s predilections, his major achievements, and the pivotal moments of his long, varied career.Since the 1973 publication of his first novel, Forgetting Elena, Edmund White (b. 1940) has become a major figure in literature and gay culture. White is, however, more than just a celebrated gay writer. He is an international man of letters, and his work crosses several genres. White’s fiction includes an autobiographical trilogy—A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony—along with more recent novels such as Jack Holmes and His Friend and Our Young Man. White’s love of French literature and culture is evident in biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud, and his antipathy to American Puritanism suffuses his collected essays and memoirs and is on full display in two early nonfiction works that helped define the era of gay liberation: The Joy of Gay Sex, coauthored with Charles Silverstein, and States of Desire: Travels in Gay America.A professor of creative writing at Princeton University, White has earned many distinctions, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Foundation’s Pioneer Award. White has been a generous interviewer, sharing his time and insights not only with major publications such as the Paris Review, but also with smaller online publications for more limited audiences. A lively commentator, White has never been afraid to speak his mind, even when the result has been public feuds with literary peers on both sides of the Atlantic.

One of the most prolific African American authors of his time, John A. Williams (1925-2015) made his mark as a journalist, educator, and writer. Having worked for Newsweek, Ebony, and Jet magazines, Williams went on to write twelve novels and numerous works of nonfiction. A vital link between the Black Arts movement and the previous era, Williams crafted works of fiction that relied on historical research as much as his own finely honed skills. From The Man Who Cried I Am, a roman à clef about expatriate African American writers in Europe, to Clifford's Blues, a Holocaust novel told in the form of the diary entries of a gay, black, jazz pianist in Dachau, these representations of black experiences marginalized from official histories make him one of our most important writers.Conversations with John A. Williams collects twenty-three interviews with the three-time winner of the American Book Award, beginning with a discussion in 1969 of his early works and ending with a previously unpublished interview from 2005. Gathered from print periodicals as well as radio and television programs, these interviews address a range of topics, including anti-black violence, Williams's WWII naval service, race and publishing, interracial romance, Martin Luther King Jr., growing up in Syracuse, the Prix de Rome scandal, traveling in Africa and Europe, and his reputation as an angry black writer. The conversations prove valuable given how often Williams drew from his own life and career for his fiction. They display the integrity, social engagement, and artistic vision that make him a writer to be reckoned with.