Writers and readers will find The Paris Review Interviews: Volume I to be an unrivaled showcase for the wit, insight, personality, and experience of sixteen literary greats. Here’s a taste of what you’ll find between the covers:
From the interview with Joan Didion:
INTERVIEWER
Do you do a lot of rewriting?
DIDION
When I’m working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm. Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won’t go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting. At the end of the day, I mark up the pages I’ve done—pages or page—all the way back to page one. I mark them up so that I can retype them in the morning. It gets me past that blank terror.
-----
From the interview with Truman Capote:
INTERVIEWER
When did you start writing?
CAPOTE
When I was a child of about ten or eleven and lived near Mobile. I had to go into town on Saturdays to the dentist and I joined the Sunshine Club that was organized by the Mobile Press Register. There was a children’s page with contests for writing and for coloring pictures, and then every Saturday afternoon they had a party with free Nehi and Coca-Cola. The prize for the short-story writing contest was either a pony or a dog, I’ve forgotten which, but I wanted it badly. I had been noticing the activities of some neighbors who were up to no good, so I wrote a kind of roman a clef called “Old Mr. Busybody” and entered it in the contest. The first installment appeared one Sunday, under my real name of Truman Streckfus Persons. Only somebody suddenly realized that I was serving up a local scandal as fiction, and the second installment never appeared. Naturally, I didn’t win a thing.
-----
From the interview with Dorothy Parker:
INTERVIEWER
How do you actually write out a story? Do you write out a draft and then go over it or what?
PARKER
It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence—no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I change seven.
INTERVIEWER
How do you name your characters?
PARKER
The telephone book and from the obituary columns.
INTERVIEWER
Do you keep a notebook?
PARKER
I tried to keep one, but I never could remember where I put the damn thing. I always say I’m going to keep one tomorrow.
INTERVIEWER
How do you get the story down on paper?
PARKER
I wrote in longhand at first, but I’ve lost it. I use two fingers on the typewriter. I think it’s unkind of you to ask. I know so little about the typewriter that once I bought a new one because I couldn’t change the ribbon on the one I had.
------------------------
The Paris Review Interviews, I also includes in-depth interviews with Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Saul Bello, Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut, James M. Cain, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Stone, Robert Gottlied, Richard Price, Billy Wilder, and Jack Gilbert.
Order your copy of The Paris Review Interviews: Volume I here.
© The Paris Review.
