Customer Reviews:
 When writers were individuated and fearless May 25, 2009
Constance Walsh
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Mine is a 1959 paperback with introduction by Malcolm Cowley. Interviews by various other writers, some well known, but their identities are totally discrete in the interviews. Here are portrayed Francoic Mauriac, E.M. Forster, Joyce Cary, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber (who I'd had no taste for until I 'heard' him speak here), Thornton Wilder, William Faulkner, Georges Siminon, Frank O'Connor, Robert Penn Warren, Alberto Moravia, Nelson Algren, Angus Wilson, William Styron, Truman Capote, Francoise Sagan. Here are souls on fire, or drowning; proud, pathetic, deeply funny, ingenious, opinionated, reactive, seemingly nonchalant, dangerously passionate, men and women who cannot not write. The interviewers are divine in their straight-faced prompts. The spaces between the words plummet the reader into oceanic depths beyond language. I cannot get enough of such character, soul, intelligence. It has become ancient and rare as the bones of saints. I want to feed on The Paris Interviews and nothing else. And laugh, weep with gratitude for those who bled words their whole lives through, and the editors and publishers who gave them to us.
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