This work includes insightful interviews with eigth masters of contemporary fiction and poetry featuring previously uncollected interviews with William Goyen, Philip Larkin, Joyce Carol Oates, Karl Shapiro, William Jay Smith, Elizabeth Spencer, William Styron, and Marya Zaturenska. Taken from a passage by Henry James, the title speaks to the madness that drives our greatest works of creativity.Robert Phillips questions his interviewees about their work methods, daily lives, influences, sources of inspiration, relationship to other literary figures, response to critics, choice of genre, and...

Critics have compared Robert Phillips's storytelling ability in his first two collections, "Land"" of ""Lost Content" and "Public Landing Revisited," to deMaupassant and Sherwood Anderson. All the stories are set in a mythical small town called Public Landing. Publishers Weekly said: "Phillips's vision of small town America in the '50s and '60s is simultaneously jaundiced and nostalgic . . . both funny and agonizing in its complex mingling of hope and humiliation" and found "flashes of brilliance throughout."
For the past decade Robert Phillips has continued to write stories about Public...