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Conversations with Ben Okri (Literary Conversations Series)
by Vanessa GuigneryConversations with Ben Okri collects twenty-six interviews that range from 1986 to 2023 and reflect the international resonance of Nigerian writer Ben Okri's work. The reader is given access to the various phases of Okri’s life and career, beginning with his childhood (b. 1959) and upbringing in Nigeria and the publication of his early short stories and novels. The interviews also explore the tremendous success of The Famished Road (for which Okri became the first Black African writer to receive the Booker Prize in 1991) and the dazzling creativity of his subsequent work in a multiplicity of literary genres. The volume offers insight into the writer’s creative process and his unique views on literature, history, memory, politics, freedom, spirituality, and environmental issues. The conversations often veer into fascinating philosophical discussions about the nature of art and reality, the value of myth, and the dynamics of storytelling.Since the publication of his first novel in 1980, Okri has encouraged his readers to open their minds and eyes to new modes of perceiving reality. Convinced of the universality of art, he has been intent on redreaming the world from a variety of perspectives in poems, essays, short stories, novels, and plays written over a period of more than forty years. Throughout his career, Ben Okri has never stopped experimenting with new forms, creating the stoku (a mixture of short story and haiku), endowing his fictional and nonfictional creations with poetic undertones, and collaborating with visual artists, musicians, and dancers.
Conversations with Beth Henley (Literary Conversations Series)
by Jackson R. Bryer and Mary C. HartigWith roots in the American South, Beth Henley (b. 1952) has for four decades been a working playwright and screenwriter. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1981 at the age of twenty-eight, Henley so far has written twenty-five produced plays that are always original, usually darkly comic, and often experimental. In these interviews, Henley speaks of the plays, from her early crowd-pleasers, Crimes of the Heart and The Miss Firecracker Contest, to her more experimental plays, including The Debutante Ball and Control Freaks, to her brilliant and time-bending play, The Jacksonian. Henley is a master at writing about the duality of human experience—the beautiful and the grotesque, the cruel and the loving. This duality provokes in Henley both amazement and compassion. She discusses here not only her admiration for Chekhov and other influences, but also her process of bringing a play from notebooks of images and bits of dialogues through rumination, writing, and rewriting to rehearsals and previews. The interviews range from 1981, just before she won the Pulitzer Prize, to 2020 and cover nearly forty years of a creative life, which, as Henley remarks in the most recent interview, is “such a life worth living: to be in tune with the creative process.”
Conversations with Billy Collins (Literary Conversations Series)
by John CusatisBilly Collins “puts the ‘fun’ back in profundity,” says poet Alice Fulton. Known for what he has called “hospitable” poems, which deftly blend wit and erudition, Collins (b. 1941) is a poet of nearly unprecedented popularity. His work is also critically esteemed and well represented in The Norton Anthology of American Literature. An English professor for five decades, Collins was fifty-seven when his poetry began gathering considerable international attention. Conversations with Billy Collins chronicles the poet’s career beginning with his 1998 interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, which exponentially expanded his readership, three years prior to his being named United States Poet Laureate. Other interviewers range from George Plimpton, founder of the Paris Review, to Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Henry Taylor to a Presbyterian pastor, a physics professor, and a class of AP English Literature students. Over the course of the twenty-one interviews included in the volume, Collins discusses such topics as discovering his persona, that consistently affable voice that narrates his often wildly imaginative poems; why poetry is so loved by children but often met with anxiety by high school students; and his experience composing a poem to be recited during a joint session of Congress on the first anniversary of 9/11, a tragedy that occurred during his tenure as poet laureate. He also explores his love of jazz, his distaste for gratuitously difficult poetry and autobiographical poems, and his beguiling invention of a mock poetic form: the paradelle. Irreverent, incisive, and deeply life-affirming—like his twelve volumes of poetry—these interviews, gathered for the first time in one volume, will edify and entertain readers in the way his sold-out readings have done for the past quarter century.
Conversations with Buddha: A Fictional Dialogue Based on Biographical Facts
by Joan Duncan OliverA relaxed chat with the Buddha tells us what he thought about impermanence, karma, mindfulness, compassion, love, and everything else that leads us toward a true understanding of ourselves and the cosmos.We know him as the Buddha, the &“Awakened One&”. Born Siddhartha Gautama 2,500 years ago in northern India, he became one of the world&’s greatest spiritual leaders. He suffered as we do, then by his own efforts found the key to liberation from the bonds of desire, hatred and ignorance. As Westerners living in relative prosperity, we can identify with this man who had it all – love, success, money, talent, privilege – but set these things aside to search for something deeper and more enduring. This book presents an account of the Buddha&’s life followed by a series of plausible and illuminating but imagined conversations, which probe all aspects of his philosophy for living. The insights he conveys here offer us practical wisdom for a better life.
Conversations with Casanova: A Fictional Dialogue Based on Biographical Facts (Conversations With #2)
by Derek ParkerImagined by one of the world's leading experts on Casanova, this fictionalised conversation presents the essential biography of history's most famous lover.A quiet chat with Casanova turns into a catalogue of racy encounters set in 18th-century Venice and other cities ... and we can even ask questions! You'll find out just how he got himself both in and out of some extremely sticky situations, from debt and imprisonment, to confrontations with jealous husbands and even heartbreak. Renowned as a great lover and seducer, Casanova was far more than a bed hopping rake. He founded the world's first national lottery, discussed theories of taxation with Frederick the Great, debated the merits of the Gregorian calendar with Catherine the Great, talked theology with Pope Clement XIII, lectured on Horace and Homer, and gave a public recital of his own poem on the Passion of the Christ. He was also an accomplished swindler, an extraordinary wit, a brilliant philosopher, a formidable duellist, and a notable spy.The impressive scale of Casanova's many gifts - and vices - is brought brilliantly to life in this innovative biography. A concise biographical essay is followed by a scintillating dialogue that is as historically rigorous as it is entertaining. As Dita Von Teese says in her Foreword: "In my most amorous fantasies, I spend languid days and glittering nights with a true 'Casanova'-- a man with a heartfelt passion for life, a thirst for knowledge and adventure, and of course a lust for refined romance." Be seduced by this brilliant book.
Conversations with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Literary Conversations Series)
by Daria TuncaNigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (b. 1977) is undoubtedly one of the most widely acclaimed African writers of the twenty-first century. Best known for her insightful fiction, viral TED talks, and essays on feminism, she is also an outspoken intellectual. As she puts it in an interview with Lia Grainger, in her characteristically straightforward style: “I have things to say and I’ll say them.”Conversations with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the first collection of interviews with the writer. Covering fifteen years of conversations, the interviews start with the publication of Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2003), and end in late 2018, by which time Adichie had become one of the most prominent figures on the international literary scene. As both scholars and passionate readers of the author’s work are bound to find out, the opinions shared by Adichie in interviews over the years coalesce into a fascinating portrait that presents both abiding features and gradual transformations.Reflecting the political and emotional scope of Adichie’s work, the conversations contained in this volume cover a wide range of topics, including colonialism, race, immigration, and feminism. Collectively, these interviews testify both to the author’s ardent wish to strive for a more just and equal world, and to her deep interest in exploring our common humanity. As Adichie says in her 2009 interview with Joshua Jelly-Schapiro: “When people call me a novelist, I say, well, yes. I really think of myself as a storyteller.” This book invites Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to tell her own literary story.
Conversations with Colson Whitehead (Literary Conversations Series)
by Derek C. MausSince the publication of his first novel, The Intuitionist, in 1999, Colson Whitehead (b. 1969) has been considered an important new voice in American literature. His seven subsequent books have done little to contradict that initial assessment, especially after 2016’s The Underground Railroad spent many weeks at the top of bestseller lists and won numerous major literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize.Ranging from 2001 to 2016, the twenty-three interviews collected in Conversations with Colson Whitehead reveal the workings of one of America’s most idiosyncratic and most successful literary minds. Through these interviews, it is clear that none of this well-earned praise has gone to his head. If anything, he still seems inclined to present himself as an awkward misfit who writes about such offbeat subject matter as rival groups of elevator inspectors, the insufficiency of off-brand “flesh-colored” bandages, or a literalized alternate version of the Underground Railroad.Whitehead speaks at length about matters related to his craft, including his varied literary and nonliterary influences, the particular methods of researching and writing that have proved valuable to telling his stories, and the ways in which he has managed the rollercoaster life of a professional writer. He also opens up about popular culture, particularly the unconventional blend of music, genre fiction, B movies, and comic books that he gleefully identifies as a passion that has persisted for him since his childhood.
Conversations with Colum McCann (Literary Conversations Series)
by Earl G. Ingersoll and Mary C. IngersollConversations with Colum McCann brings together eighteen interviews with a world-renowned fiction writer. Ranging from his 1994 literary debut, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, to a previously unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews represent the development as well as the continuation of McCann's interests. The number and length of the later conversations attest to his star-power. Let the Great World Spin earned him the National Book Award and promises to become a major motion picture. His most recent novel, TransAtlantic, has awed readers with its dynamic yoking of the 1845-46 visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland, the 1919 first nonstop transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown, and Senator George Mitchell's 1998 efforts to achieve a peace accord in Northern Ireland. An extensive interview by scholar Cécile Maudet is included here, as is an interview by John Cusatis, who wrote Understanding Colum McCann, the first extensive critical analysis of McCann's work. An author who actually enjoys talking about his work, McCann (b. 1965) offers insights into his method of writing, what he hopes to achieve, as well as the challenge of writing each novel to go beyond his accomplishments in the novel before. Readers will note how many of his responses include stories in which he himself is the object of the humor and how often his remarks reveal insights into his character as a man who sees the grittiness of the urban landscape but never loses faith in the strength of ordinary people and their capacity to prevail.
Conversations with Dana Gioia (Literary Conversations Series)
by John ZhengConversations with Dana Gioia is the first collection of interviews with the internationally known poet and public intellectual, covering every stage of his busy, polymathic career. Dana Gioia (b. 1950) has made many contributions to contemporary American literature and culture, including but not limited to crafting a personal poetic style suited to the age; leading the revival of rhyme, meter, and narrative through New Formalism; walloping the “intellectual ghetto” of American poetry through his epochal article “Can Poetry Matter?”; helping American poetry move forward by organizing influential conferences; providing public service and initiating nationwide arts projects such as Poetry Out Loud through his leadership of the National Endowment for the Arts; and editing twenty best-selling literary anthologies widely used in American classrooms. Taken together, the twenty-two collected interviews increase our understanding of Gioia’s poetry and poetics, offer aesthetic pleasure in themselves, and provide a personal encounter with a writer who has made poetry matter. The book presents the actual voice of Dana Gioia, who speaks of his personal and creative life and articulates his unique vision of American culture and poetry.
Conversations with Dave Eggers (Literary Conversations Series)
by Scott F. ParkerIt’s been barely twenty years since Dave Eggers (b. 1970) burst onto the American literary scene with the publication of his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. In that time, he has gone on to publish several books of fiction, a few more books of nonfiction, a dozen books for children, and many harder-to-classify works. In addition to his authorship, Eggers has established himself as an influential publisher, editor, and designer. He has also founded a publishing company, McSweeney’s; two magazines, Might and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern; and several nonprofit organizations. This whirlwind of productivity, within publishing and beyond, gives Eggers a unique standing among American writers: jack of all trades, master of same.The interviews contained in Conversations with Dave Eggers suggest the range of Eggers’s pursuits—a range that is reflected in the variety of the interviews themselves. In addition to the expected interviews with major publications, Eggers engages here with obscure magazines and blogs, trade publications, international publications, student publications, and children from a mentoring program run by one of his nonprofits. To read the interviews in sequence is to witness Eggers’s rapid evolution. The cultural hysteria around Eggers’s memoir and his complicated relationship with celebrity are clear in many of the earlier interviews. From there, as the buzz around him mellows, Eggers responds in kind, allowing writing and his other endeavors to come to the fore of his conversations. Together, these interviews provide valuable insight into a driving force in contemporary American literature.
Conversations with David Foster Wallace (Literary Conversations Series)
by Stephen J. BurnAcross two decades of intense creativity, David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) crafted a remarkable body of work that ranged from unclassifiable essays to a book about transfinite mathematics to vertiginous fictions. Whether through essay volumes (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, Consider the Lobster), short story collections (Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion), or his novels (Infinite Jest, The Broom of the System), the luminous qualities of Wallace's work recalibrated our measures of modern literary achievement. Conversations with David Foster Wallace gathers twenty-two interviews and profiles that trace the arc of Wallace's career, shedding light on his omnivorous talent. Jonathan Franzen has argued that, for Wallace, an interview provided a formal enclosure in which the writer “could safely draw on his enormous native store of kindness and wisdom and expertise.” Wallace's interviews create a wormhole in which an author's private theorizing about art spill into the public record. Wallace's best interviews are vital extra-literary documents, in which we catch him thinking aloud about his signature concerns—irony's magnetic hold on contemporary language, the pale last days of postmodernism, the delicate exchange that exists between reader and writer. At the same time, his acute focus moves across MFA programs, his negotiations with religious belief, the role of footnotes in his writing, and his multifaceted conception of his work's architecture. Conversations with David Foster Wallace includes a previously unpublished interview from 2005, and a version of Larry McCaffery's influential Review of Contemporary Fiction interview with Wallace that has been expanded with new material drawn from the original raw transcript.
Conversations with Diane di Prima (Literary Conversations Series)
by David Stephen CalonneDiane di Prima (1934–2020) was one of the most important American poets of the twentieth century, and her career is distinguished by strong contributions to both literature and social justice. Di Prima and LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) edited The Floating Bear (1962–69), one of the most significant underground publications of the sixties. Di Prima’s poetry and prose chronicle her opposition to the Vietnam War; her advocacy of the rights of Blacks, Native Americans, and the LGBTQ community; her concern about environmental issues; and her commitment to creating a world free of exploitation and poverty. In addition, di Prima is significant due to her challenges to the roles that American women were expected to play in society. Her Memoirs of a Beatnik was a sensation, and she talks about its lasting impact as well. Conversations with Diane di Prima presents twenty interviews ranging from 1972 to 2010 that chart di Prima’s intellectual, spiritual, and political evolution. From her adolescence, di Prima was fascinated by occult, esoteric, and magical philosophies. In these interviews readers can see the ways these concepts influenced both her personal life and her poetry and prose. We are able to view di Prima’s life course from her year at Swarthmore College; her move back to New York and then to San Francisco; her studies of Zen Buddhism; her fascination with the I Ching, Paracelsus, John Dee, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, alchemy, Tarot, and Kabbalah; and her later engagement with Tibetan Buddhism and work with Chögyam Trungpa. Another particularly interesting aspect of the book is the inclusion of interviews that explore di Prima’s career as an independent publisher—she founded Poets Press in New York and Eidolon Editions in California—and her commitment to promoting writers such as Audre Lorde. Taken together, these interviews reveal di Prima as both a writer of genius and an intensely honest, direct, passionate, and committed advocate of a revolution in consciousness.
Conversations with Dickens: A Fictional Dialogue Based on Biographical Facts
by Paul SchlickeSheltering from a summer downpour, you encounter the ghost of Charles Dickens. Join him for a chat in the inn beloved by Mr Pickwick and be swept away by his vigour, warmth and humanity. You&’ll feel as if you&’ve known him all your life.The great novelist Charles Dickens attracted international adulation on an unprecedented scale. He cultivated a genial intimacy with his readers, and after he died many of his admirers felt that they had lost a personal friend. Sit back and listen to this master conversationalist talk about everything from work in a boot-polish factory to lecture tours in America.Who could possibly ask for more?
Conversations with Donald Hall (Literary Conversations Series)
by John Martin-Joy, Allan Cooper and Richard RohfritchConversations with Donald Hall offers a unique glimpse into the creative process of a major American poet, writer, editor, anthologist, and teacher. The volume probes in depth Hall’s evolving views on poetry, poets, and the creative process over a period of more than sixty years. Donald Hall (1928–2018) reveals vivid, funny, and moving anecdotes about T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the sculptor Henry Moore; he talks about his excitement on his return to New Hampshire and the joys of his marriage with Jane Kenyon; and he candidly discusses his loss and grief when Kenyon died in 1995 at the age of forty-seven. The thirteen interviews range from a detailed exploration of the composition of “Ox Cart Man” to the poems that make up Without, an almost unbearable poetry of grief that was written following Jane Kenyon’s death. The book also follows Hall into old age, when he turned to essay writing and the reflections on aging that make up Essays after Eighty. This moving and insightful collection of interviews is crucial for anyone interested in poetry and the creative process, the techniques and achievements of modern American poetry, and the elusive psychology of creativity and loss.
Conversations with Edmund White (Literary Conversations Series)
by Will Brantley and Nancy McGuire RocheConversations with Edmund White brings together twenty-one interviews with an author known for chronicling gay culture. Ranging from a 1982 discussion of his early works to a new and unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews highlight White's predilections, his major achievements, and the pivotal moments of his long, varied career. Since the 1973 publication of his first novel, Forgetting Elena, Edmund White (b. 1940) has become a major figure in literature and gay culture. White is, however, more than just a celebrated gay writer. He is an international man of letters, and his work crosses several genres. White's fiction includes an autobiographical trilogy—A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty, and The Farewell Symphony—along with more recent novels such as Jack Holmes and His Friend and Our Young Man. White's love of French literature and culture is evident in biographies of Jean Genet, Marcel Proust, and Arthur Rimbaud, and his antipathy to American Puritanism suffuses his collected essays and memoirs and is on full display in two early nonfiction works that helped define the era of gay liberation: The Joy of Gay Sex, coauthored with Charles Silverstein, and States of Desire: Travels in Gay America. A professor of creative writing at Princeton University, White has earned many distinctions, including the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award. White has been a generous interviewer, sharing his time and insights not only with major publications such as The Paris Review, but also with smaller online publications for more limited audiences. A lively commentator, White has never been afraid to speak his mind, even when the result has been public feuds with literary peers on both sides of the Atlantic.
Conversations with Edna O'Brien (Literary Conversations Series)
by Alice Hughes Kersnowski“Who’s afraid of Edna O’Brien?” asks an early interviewer in Conversations with Edna O’Brien. With over fifty years of published novels, biographies, plays, telecasts, short stories, and more, it is hard not to be intimidated by her. An acclaimed and controversial Irish writer, O’Brien (b. 1930) saw her early works, starting in 1960 with The Country Girls, banned and burned in Ireland, but often read in secret. Her contemporary work continues to spark debates on the rigors and challenges of Catholic conservatism and the struggle for women to make a place for themselves in the world without anxiety and guilt. The raw nerve of emotion at the heart of her lyrical prose provokes readers, challenges politicians, and proves difficult for critics to place her.In these interviews, O’Brien finds her own critical voice and moves interviewers away from a focus on her life as the “once infamous Edna” toward a focus on her works. Parallels between Edna O’Brien and her literary muse and mentor, James Joyce, are often cited in interviews such as Philip Roth’s description of The Country Girls as a “rural Dubliners.” While Joyce is the centerpiece of O’Brien’s literary pantheon, allusions to writers such as Shakespeare, Chekhov, Beckett, and Woolf become a medium for her critical voice. Conversations with contemporary writers Philip Roth and Glenn Patterson reveal Edna O’Brien’s sense of herself as a contemporary writer. The final interview included here, with BBC personality William Crawley at Queen’s University Belfast, is a synthesis of her acceptance and fame as an Irish writer and an Irish woman and an affirmation of her literary authority.
Conversations with Edwidge Danticat (Literary Conversations Series)
by Maxine Lavon MontgomeryThis volume sheds a much-needed light on Edwidge Danticat (b. 1969) and her ability to depict timely issues in sparkling prose that delves deep into the borderlands, an uncharted in-between space located outside fixed geographic, cultural, and ideological bounds. Prevalent throughout many interviews here is Danticat's expressed determination not only to reveal Haitian immigrant experience, but also to make that nuanced culture and its vibrant traditions accessible to a wide audience.These interviews coincide with Edwidge Danticat's evolving artistic vision, her steady book publication, and her expanding roles as fiction writer, essayist, memoirist, documentarian, young adult book author, editor, songwriter, cultural critic, and political commentator. Dating from her appearance on the literary scene at the age of twenty-five, the many interviews that she has granted attest to not only her productivity, but also her accessibility to scholars, teachers, writers, and journalists eager for knowledge about her vision. Included in this volume are interviews that range from 2000, covering the publication of her debut work of fiction, Breath, Eyes, Memory, to a personal interview conducted with the volume editor in 2016. In that conversation, which appears for the first time as part of this collection, Danticat provides insight into little-known aspects of her life, art, and politics.Her candid interviews carry out a careful stripping away of preconceived notions of Danticat, disclosing the private and public life of a first-class writer and intellectual whose countless achievements have assured her an enduring place within contemporary world letters.
Conversations with Einstein: A Fictional Dialogue Based on Biographical Facts
by Carlos CalleBy power of thought alone, Albert Einstein gave us a fresh conception of the universe. He showed us that space and time are elastic – shrinking or expanding, speeding up or slowing down, depending on your movement. Beginning with an inspiring foreword by eminent Professor of Mathematics Sir Roger Penrose, the book is then divided into two parts: a biographical essay that provides a concise overview of Einstein's life, achievements, personal loves and public controversies; and a Q&A dialogue based on rigorous research and incorporating Einstein's actual spoken or written words whenever possible. Research physicist Carlos Calle brings Einstein to life through meticulously researched biographical interpretations of Einstein's revolutionary mathematical work. Relax and chat with this genius as he tells you about his work on relativity, his quest for a grand unifying theory of the cosmos, and personal matters – from the pleasures of sailing and music to his anxieties about the nuclear bomb he had helped unleash.
Conversations with Frank Gehry
by Barbara IsenbergAn unprecedented, intimate, and richly illustrated portrait of Frank Gehry, one of the world's most influential architects. Drawing on the most candid, revealing, and entertaining conversations she has had with Gehry over the last twenty years, Barbara Isenberg provides new and fascinating insights into the man and his work.Gehry's subjects range from his childhood--when he first built cities with wooden blocks on the floor of his grandmother's kitchen--to his relationships with clients and his definition of a "great" client. We learn about his architectural influences (including Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright) and what he has learned from Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rauschenberg.We explore the thinking behind his designs for the Guggenheim Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the redevelopment of Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn and Grand Avenue in Los Angeles, the Gehry Collection at Tiffany's, and ongoing projects in Toronto, Paris, Abu Dhabi, and elsewhere. And we follow as Gehry illuminates the creative process by which his ideas first take shape--for example, through early drawings for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, when the building's trademark undulating curves were mere scribbles on a page. Sketches, models, and computer images provided by Gehry himself allow us to see how so many of his landmark buildings have come to fruition, step by step.Conversations with Frank Gehry is essential reading for everyone interested in the art and craft of architecture, and for everyone fascinated by the most iconic buildings of our time, as well as the man and the mind behind them.From the Hardcover edition.
Conversations with Freud: A Fictional Dialogue Based on Biographical Facts
by D.M. ThomasSigmund Freud was no stranger to controversy. He shocked many with his revolutionary theories on human development, desires and sexuality, and transformed the way we think about ourselves today. Starting with a brilliant foreword from renowned psychologist Edward de Bono, the book is then divided into two parts: a biographical essay that provides a concise overview of Freud's life, achievements, theories and controversies; and a Q&A dialogue based on rigorous research and incorporating Freud's actual spoken or written words whenever possible. D.M. Thomas carefully guides us through Freud's life and theories that would lead to him become the father of psychoanalysis. In frank conversation, full of energy and spiced with cynicism and wit, he'll interpret your wildest fantasies and strangest dreams, and even let you in on a few family secrets.
Conversations with Galileo: A Fictional Dialogue Based on Biographical Facts
by William SheaWhen Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope to the skies, he ushered in a scientific revolution: the Moon turned out to be covered with mountains and craters, stars popped out of nowhere, and four satellites were found to be orbiting Jupiter. His discovery of the phases of Venus in 1610 forever shattered the notion that the Sun orbited the Earth and transformed humanity&’s sense of itself and its place in the cosmos. It also contributed to the demise of the idea that knowledge about the world was to be found in ancient texts or supernatural authority.Eavesdrop on an enlightening conversation, and make your own discoveries – about Galileo&’s life in the Medici court, his love of wine and women, and how he came to spend his last eight years under house arrest.
Conversations with Gary Snyder (Literary Conversations Series)
by David Stephen CalonneGary Snyder (b. 1930) is one of the most distinguished American poets, remarkable both for his long and productive career and for his equal contributions to literature and environmental thought. His childhood in the Pacific Northwest profoundly shaped his sensibility due to his contact with Native American culture and his early awareness of the destruction of the environment by corporations. Although he emerged from the San Francisco Renaissance with writers such as Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, and William Everson, he became associated with the Beats due to his friendships with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who included a portrait of Snyder as Japhy Ryder in his novel The Dharma Bums. After graduating from Reed College, Snyder became deeply involved with Zen Buddhism, and he spent twelve years in Japan immersed in study.Conversations with Gary Snyder collects interviews from 1961 to 2015 and charts his developing environmental philosophy and his wide-ranging interests in ecology, Buddhism, Native American studies, history, and mythology. The book also demonstrates the ways Snyder has returned throughout his career to key ideas such as the extended family, shamanism, poetics, visionary experience, and caring for the environment as well as his relationship to the Beat movement. Because the book contains interviews spanning more than fifty years, the reader witnesses how Snyder has evolved and grown both as a poet and philosopher of humanity's proper relationship to the cosmos while remaining committed to the issues that preoccupied him as a young man.
Conversations with George Saunders (Literary Conversations Series)
by Michael O’ConnellBesides being one of America’s most celebrated living authors, George Saunders (b. 1958) is also an excellent interview subject. In the fourteen interviews included in Conversations with George Saunders, covering nearly twenty years of his career, the Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December provides detailed insight into his own writing process and craft, alongside nuanced interpretations of his own work. He also delves into aspects of his biography, including anecdotes from his childhood and his experiences as both a student and teacher in MFA programs, as well as reflections on how parenthood affected his writing, the role of religious belief and practice in his work, and how he has dealt with his growing popularity and fame. Throughout this collection, we see him in conversation with former students, fellow writers, mainstream critics, and literary scholars. In each instance, Saunders is eager to engage in meaningful dialogue about what he calls the “big questions of our age.” In a number of interviews, he reflects on the moral and ethical responsibility of fiction, as well as how his work engages with issues of social and political commentary. But at the same time, these interviews, like all of Saunders’s best work, are funny, warm, surprising, and wise. Saunders says he has “always enjoyed doing interviews” in part because he views “intense, respectful conversation [as], really, an artform—an exploration of sorts.” Readers of this volume will have the pleasure of joining him in this process of exploration.
Conversations with Gish Jen (Literary Conversations Series)
by John Zheng and Biling ChenConversations with Gish Jen is the first collection of interviews with the renowned contemporary American author Gish Jen (b. 1955), whose acclaimed fiction and nonfiction have fascinated American readers for more than thirty years. The conversations in this book offer first-hand information not only about Jen’s authorial intentions, but also about her life as a daughter of Chinese immigrants. Spanning more than two decades, beginning in 1991 and ending with a new, unpublished interview from 2017, these interviews provide readers a sense of Jen’s development as a novelist and cultural critic. Jen’s insights into the merits and drawbacks of Eastern and Western cultures, including American individualism and exceptionalism and Asian interdependent mindset and living principles, provide us with keys to understanding the identity struggles of the author herself as well as her fictional characters. The comparative approach Jen adopts in her comments on such topics as education, politics, business, religion, and concepts of creativity and success provokes readers to reflect on their relationships with themselves, with the society in which they live, and with the rest of the world. At the heart of these conversations is Jen’s sense of humor, which makes the book a joyful read for both scholars and casual fans of her work.
Conversations with Goethe
by Johann Peter EckermannA perceptive introduction to the mind of one of German's greatest writers, in a new translation for the first time in 150 years'The best German book there is' Nietzsche By the turn of the nineteenth century, the poet, novelist and thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was one of the most famous people in the world. In 1823 he became friend and mentor to the young writer Johann Eckermann, who, for the last nine years of Goethe's life, recorded their wide-ranging conversations on art, literature, science and philosophy. This rich portrait of Germany's literary elder statesman, now in its first new translation for over 150 years, gives a fascinating glimpse into a great mind as well as 'many insights and invaluable lessons about life.'Translated by Allan Blunden with an Introduction by Ritchie Robertson