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...

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.

From the early sixties, when she published the award-winning A Family's Affairs, to the late nineties and the publication of Truth: Four Stories I Am Finally Old Enough to Tell, Ellen Douglas has written...

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...

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. -What interests me most in writing are the characters, - she says. -I have a lot of trouble thinking of plots, but I love to create the people. I think a person that you create is coming out of some aspect of yourself.-

Smith's career...

Pulitzer Prize--winning author Richard Ford is a leading figure among American writers of the post--World War II generation. His novel The Sportswriter (1986), along with its sequel Independence Day (1995)--the first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in the same year--made Frank Bascombe, Ford's suburban Everyman, as much a part of the American literary landscape as John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom. With three other novels, a critically acclaimed volume of short stories, and a trilogy of novellas to his credit, Ford's reputation and his place in...

To many readers Christopher Isherwood means Berlin. The author of Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the British Isherwood found fame through the adaptation of that work into the stage play and film I Am a Camera and then into the stage musical and film Cabaret.

Throughout his career he was a keen observer, always seemingly in the right place at the right time. Whether in Berlin in the 1930s or in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, Isherwood (1904--86) reflected on his life and his world and wrote perceptive commentary on contemporary European and American history...

In Conversations with Mary Gordon, Mary Gordon reveals her intellectual vigor, her freewheeling humor, and her strongly held opinions on issues ranging from sex to contemporary literature and gender theory. With candor, she details her departure from and eventual return to her Irish-Catholic heritage.

Since the resounding success of her first novel, Final Payments (1978), Gordon has been one of America's most popular and controversial writers. She has published five novels, three novellas, two collections of essays, a short story collection, a memoir, a biography of Joan...

Elie Wiesel has given hundreds of interviews. Yet his fame as a human rights advocate often directs such conversations toward non-literary issues. Indeed, many of Wiesel's questioners barely address the writer's role that has defined him since the 1950s.

Unlike previous volumes in which he speaks with interviewers, Elie Wiesel: Conversations collects interviews which set in relief the writer at work. This book focuses on Wiesel the literary artist instead of Wiesel the Holocaust survivor or the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Beyond highlighting Wiesel's literary...