Denise Levertov, American poet and activist, died in December 1997 at the age of 74. This book contains some twenty previously uncollected interviews conducted between the early 1960s and the middle of the 1990s. They are focused primarily on her work as a poet but also on her social and political concerns. She was forty years old and already recognized as an important poet at the time of the first of these interviews. She was past seventy and an icon of American culture at the time of the most recent.

Levertov was born in England of a Welsh mother and a Russian-born Anglican priest...

Jorge Luis Borges, one of the indisputably great writers of the twentieth century, was born in Buenos Aires in 1899. Never having been awarded the Nobel Prize, which his readers worldwide believed he deserved, this story writer, poet, essayist, and man of letters died at age eighty-six.

This anthology of interviews with him features more than a dozen conversations that cover all phases of his life and work.

Conducted between 1964 and 1984, the interviews reveal Borges to be a remarkably candid, humorous man, by turns skeptical and enthusiastic, and always a singularly incisive and...

-When a writer passes through the wall of oblivion, he will even then stop long enough to write something on the wall, like 'Kilroy was here.'-

William Faulkner was not keen on giving interviews. More often than not, he refused, as when he wrote an aspiring interviewer in 1950, -Sorry but no. Am violently opposed to interviews and publicity.- Yet during the course of his prolific writing career, the truth is that he submitted to the ordeal on numerous occasions in the United States and abroad.
Although three earlier volumes were thought to have gathered most of Faulkner's...

-We're living a national ideology that's invisible to us because we're inside it.-

At the outset of his career E. L. Doctorow told Paul Levine, -History written by historians is clearly insufficient.- Doctorow's novels carry out that conviction by imagining the great moments of American history--the Old West, the gilded age, the Depression, the cold war--as backdrops for tales of excruciating moral pain and injustice in America.
In Conversations with E. L. Doctorow Christopher D. Morris has gathered over twenty of the most revelatory interviews with the acclaimed author of...

Although a rather shy, private man, William Burroughs gave a good many interviews during his lifetime, some in prominent publications, others in obscure forums. The interviews collected here provide an aperture into the philosophies, methods, and quirks of a man who wrote Queer, Junky, Naked Lunch, Nova Express, Cities of the Red Night, My Education, and many other works.

When he died in 1997, Burroughs was likely one of the most widely recognizable figures in contemporary American literature. His image circulated on album jackets, in Nike commercials, and in films, as though proving...

Acclaim, success, and controversy follow every one of Salman Rushdie's writings. His novels and stories have won him awards and made him both famous in the literary world and a catalyst for protests worldwide. For nearly a decade after publication of The Satanic Verses, he faced a bounty on his life.

Although Rushdie has participated in a great number of interviews, many of his most...

Although best known for his novels The Collector, The Magus, and The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles is also a short story writer, a poet, a respected translator, and a prolific essayist. In his long literary career, he has managed the feats of welding stunning innovation to tradition, pushing the formal boundaries of literary fiction, and still capturing critical acclaim, popular success, and a worldwide readership.

In Conversations with John Fowles, the first book of interviews devoted to the English writer, Dianne L. Vipond gathers over twenty of...

Leslie Marmon Silko, one of America's best known Native authors, was born in 1948 and grew up at Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, of mixed Laguna, Mexican, and white ancestry. Her early short stories, poems, and brilliant first novel Ceremony (1977) earned her recognition as a star of the Native American Renaissance. In Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko, her readers will find both the power that fueled her early work and an update on her...

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka is the most prominent writer from the African continent and one of the greatest living playwrights in the English language. His plays have been produced by the leading professional and repertory companies and stages in the English-speaking world including the National Theatre in Britain and the Lincoln Center in New York.

At the same time, Soyinka has been the most consistent campaigner against civil and human rights violations and abuses, on occasion using his drama, poetry, and essays to speak out powerfully and eloquently in defense of the freedom of...

One of America's most popular Jewish writers, Chaim Potok (b. 1929) is the author of such novels as The Chosen (1967), The Promise (1969), The Book of Lights (1981), and Davita's Harp (1985). Each of his novels explores the tension between tradition and modernity, and the clash between Jewish culture and contemporary Western civilization, which he calls -core-to-core culture confrontation.-

Although primarily known as a novelist, Potok is an ordained Conservative rabbi and a world-class Judaic scholar who has also published children's books, theological...