For today’s post, here are some Paris Review interviews I like. They’re available for free on the magazine’s website, which is where I recently read them. For good measure, I then headed out to my local bookstore and bought the summer issue of the magazine – with two great interviews about “the art of the theater” and a spellbinding essay about pirates and New Orleans, among other things – because we all have to do what we can to support such a worthy endeavor, and the cultural world would be poorer if the Paris Review interviews didn’t exist.
My selection of interviews (and I’m sure I forgot many more worthwhile ones):
- Ha Jin (2009)
- Orhan Pamuk (2005)
- Russell Banks (1998)
- David McCullough (1999)
- Arthur Miller Part 1 (1966) Part 2 (1999)
- Lillian Hellman (1965)
- Alice Munro (1994)
- Tennessee Williams (1981)
- Ismail Kadare (1998)
- Czeslaw Milosz (1994)
- Octavio Paz (1991)
- Heinrich Boll (1983)
- Donald Hall (1991)
What are your favorite Paris Review interviews? Any pointer on a great interview that might’ve escaped my attention?
As a side note, the magazine has published several volumes of interviews, the first one of which I own, but the archives of interviews beg for a print-on-demand feature where people could choose which interviews they want to include in the “book” of Paris Review interviews they are about to create, with pricing done accordingly. It is the twenty-first century: embrace it.
Those interviews offer a fascinating glimpse into the writing world and the personalities of yesterday’s and today’s greatest fiction or nonfiction writers – the questions aren’t trite without being obtuse, and the interviewees become real people of flesh and bones who discuss openly their careers, books (or plays) and daily routines. I can’t think of any other magazine that provides readers with such in-depth interviews. A must for writers, but also for anyone who cares about creativity. Simply priceless.
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