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Conversations with Neil Gaiman (Literary Conversations Series)
by Joseph Michael SommersNeil Gaiman (b. 1960) currently reigns in the literary world as one of the most critically decorated and popular authors of the last fifty years. Perhaps best known as the writer of the Harvey, Eisner, and World Fantasy Award-winning DC/Vertigo series, The Sandman, Gaiman quickly became equally renowned in literary circles for works such as Neverwhere, Coraline, and American Gods, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie Medal-winning The Graveyard Book. For adults, for children, for the comics reader to the viewer of the BBC’s Doctor Who, Gaiman’s writing has crossed the borders of virtually all media and every language, making him a celebrity on a worldwide scale. The interviews presented here span the length of his career, beginning with his first formal interview by the BBC at the age of seven and ending with a new, unpublished interview held in 2017. They cover topics as wide and varied as a young Gaiman's thoughts on Scientology and managing anger, learning the comics trade from Alan Moore, and being on the clock virtually 24/7. What emerges is a complicated picture of a man who seems fully assembled from the start of his career, but only came to feel comfortable in his own skin and voice far later in life. The man who brought Morpheus from the folds of his imagination into the world shares his dreams and aspirations from different points in his life, including informing readers where he plans to take them next.
Conversations with Neil Simon (Literary Conversations Series)
by Jackson R. Bryer and Ben SiegelNeil Simon (1927–2018) began as a writer for some of the leading comedians of the day—including Jackie Gleason, Red Buttons, Phil Silvers, and Jerry Lewis—and he wrote for fabled television programs alongside a group of writers that included Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Michael Stewart, and Sid Caesar. After television, Simon embarked on a playwriting career. In the next four decades he saw twenty-eight of his plays and five musicals produced on Broadway. Thirteen of those plays and three of the musicals ran for more than five hundred performances. He was even more widely known for his screenplays—some twenty-five in all. Yet, despite this success, it was not until his BB Trilogy—Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound—that critics and scholars began to take Simon seriously as a literary figure. This change in perspective culminated in 1991 when his play Lost in Yonkers won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In the twenty-two interviews included in Conversations with Neil Simon, Simon talks candidly about what it was like to write commercially successful plays that were dismissed by critics and scholars. He also speaks at length about the differences between writing for television, for the stage, and for film. He speaks openly and often revealingly about his relationships with, among many others, Mike Nichols, Walter Matthau, Sid Caesar, and Jack Lemmon. Above all, these interviews reveal Neil Simon as a writer who thought long and intelligently about creating for stage, film, and television, and about dealing with serious subjects in a comic mode. In so doing, Conversations with Neil Simon compels us to recognize Neil Simon’s genius.
Conversations with Orhan Pamuk (Literary Conversations Series)
by Erdağ Göknar and Pelin KıvrakIn over thirty interviews conducted between 1982 and 2022, Conversations with Orhan Pamuk reveals a writer of intense literary and political engagement.Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk (b. 1952) is a foremost practitioner of the global novel today. His books have been translated into over sixty languages and sold over fifteen million copies globally. The interviews in this volume open windows onto Pamuk's everyday life, craft, and process, constituting an alternative literary history that provides insights into the novelist's influences, method, form, and content. These conversations reveal that a Pamuk novel is predicated on methodical research, at times archival and scholarly, investigative and journalistic, or ethnographic. They are necessarily instructive and edifying as much as they are entertaining, providing a discursive space of literary history where writing, politics, and the everyday intersect and where the politics of literature can be located.
Conversations with Paul Auster (Literary Conversations Series)
by James M. HutchissonPaul Auster (b. 1947) is one of the most critically acclaimed and intensely studied authors in America today. His varied career as a novelist, poet, translator, and filmmaker has attracted scholarly scrutiny from a variety of critical perspectives. The steadily rising arc of his large readership has made him something of a popular culture figure with many appearances in print interviews, as well as on television, the radio, and the internet. Auster's best-known novel may be his first, City of Glass (1985), a grim and intellectually puzzling mystery that belies its surface image as a “detective novel” and goes on to become a profound meditation on transience and mortality, the inadequacies of language, and isolation. Fifteen more novels have followed since then, including The Music of Chance, Moon Palace, The Book of Illusions, and The Brooklyn Follies. He has, in the words of one critic, “given the phrase ‘experimental fiction’ a good name” by fashioning bona fide literary works with all the rigor and intellect demanded of the contemporary avant-garde. This volume—the first of its kind on Auster—will be useful to both scholars and students for the penetrating self-analysis and the wide range of biographical information and critical commentary it contains. Conversations with Paul Auster covers all of Auster's oeuvre, from The New York Trilogy—of which City of Glass is a component—to Sunset Park (2010), along with his screenplays for Smoke (1995) and Blue in the Face (1996). Within, Auster nimbly discusses his poetry, memoir, nonfiction, translations, and film directing.
Conversations with Percival Everett (Literary Conversations Series)
by Joe WeixlmannFor the first eighteen years of his career, Percival Everett (b. 1956) managed to fly under the radar of the literary establishment. He followed his artistic vision down a variety of unconventional paths, including his preference for releasing his books through independent publishers. But with the publication of his novel erasure in 2001, his literary talent could no longer be kept under wraps. The author of more than twenty-five books, Everett has established himself as one of America's—and arguably the world's—premier twenty-first-century fiction writers. Among his many honors since 2000 are Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards for erasure and I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) and three prominent awards for his 2005 novel Wounded—the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, France's Prix Lucioles des Libraires, and Italy's Premio Vallombrosa Gregor von Rezzori Prize. Interviews collected in this volume—several of which appear in print or in English translation for the first time—display Everett's abundant wit as well as the independence of thought that has led to his work being described as “characteristically uncharacteristic.” At one moment he speaks with great sophistication about the fact that African American authors are forced to overcome constraining expectations about their subject matter that white writers are not. And in the next he talks about training mules or quips about “Jim Crow,” a pet bird Everett had on his ranch outside Los Angeles. Everett discusses race and gender, his ecological interests, the real and mythic American West, the eclectic nature of his work, the craft of writing, language and linguistic theory, and much more.
Conversations with Rick Veitch (Conversations with Comic Artists Series)
by Brannon CostelloFrom his roots in underground comics to his high-profile runs on mainstream characters, Rick Veitch (b. 1951) has carved out a career unlike anyone else’s. Collecting thirteen interviews—including three published here for the first time—Conversations with Rick Veitch offers a wealth of insight not only into the development of Veitch’s graphic innovations and metaphysical explorations, but also into the upheavals and transformations of American comics from the 1970s to today. In acclaimed comics such as The Maximortal, Army@Love, and Can’t Get No, Veitch employs a style that synthesizes Jack Kirby at his most cosmic, the mind-bending graphic sensibility of European innovators such as Jean (Moebius) Giraud and Philippe Druillet, and the brass-tacks realism of classic war cartoonists such as John Severin and Russ Heath. His comics defamiliarize popular genres—especially superheroes, war stories, and science fiction—with his philosophical musings and pointedly satirical political perspective. Yet Veitch’s capacious mind reaches beyond these familiar genres, too, as his long-running autobiographical dream comic Roarin’ Rick’s Rare Bit Fiends attests. Ranging across topics such as his early days at the Joe Kubert School, the controversial end of his Swamp Thing run, his muckraking work as a comics journalist, and his educational comics publishing venture, Eureka Comics, the interviews collected here reveal Veitch to be both a shrewd observer of the pitfalls of the marketplace and an eloquent spokesman for the boundless potential of creativity. A comics maker since childhood and a fierce advocate of creator’s rights and the possibilities of self-publishing, Veitch knows all too well the many persistent obstacles to creating comics that challenge readers instead of condescending to them. Yet Veitch remains optimistic about the potential of comics. According to Veitch, comics “might be the form of the future.” If that’s the case, then his work is a map to that future.
Conversations with Robert Morgan (Literary Conversations Series)
by Randall Wilhelm and Jesse GravesRobert Morgan (b. 1944) is one of the most distinguished writers in southern and Appalachian literature, celebrated for his novels, poetry, short fiction, and historical and biographical writing, totaling more than thirty volumes. Morgan’s work gives voice to the traditionally underrepresented people of southern Appalachia, and his appearances in such popular venues as The Oprah Winfrey Show, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, and the New York Times Bestseller List have contributed to his wide readership and successful dismantling of Hollywood stereotypes that still dog the region in the nation’s larger consciousness. His writing makes a case for the dignity of work, the beauty and terror of the landscape, and the essential value of creating a community and learning to live in the world.The interviews in Conversations with Robert Morgan provide readers and scholars the first stand-alone book on Morgan’s long and fascinating career as a master of multiple genres, and make a significant contribution to the understanding of American, southern, and Appalachian literature and culture. Collected here are five decades of interviews that cover such topics as literary influence, the impact of war on family and community, poetic and narrative craft, the role of environmentalism in American literature, and the journey from impoverished North Carolina mountain boy to award-winning Ivy League professor. Morgan is Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1971. Readers will learn about writing across multiple genres, craft that can be learned and practiced by a writer, and studying the past for those present truths that create what Morgan values most in literature, “a community across time.”
Conversations with Robert Stone (Literary Conversations Series)
by William HeathEver since A Hall of Mirrors depicted the wild side of New Orleans in the 1960s, Robert Stone (1937-2015) has situated novels where America has shattered and the action is at a pitch. In Dog Soldiers, he covered the Vietnam War and drug smuggling. A Flag for Sunrise captured revolutionary discontent in Central America. Children of Light exposed the crass values of Hollywood. Outerbridge Reach depicted how existential angst can lead to a longing for heroic transcendence. The clash of religions in Jerusalem drove Damascus Gate. Traditional town-gown tensions amid twenty-first-century culture wars propelled Death of the Black-Haired Girl.Stone's reputation rests on his mastery of the craft of fiction. These interviews are replete with insights about the creative process as he responds with disarming honesty to probing questions about his major works. Stone also has fascinating things to say about his remarkable life--a schizophrenic mother, a stint in the navy, his involvement with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, and his presence at the creation of the counterculture. From the publication of A Hall of Mirrors until his death in 2015, Stone was a major figure in American literature.
Conversations with Ron Rash (Literary Conversations Series)
by Mae Miller Claxton and Rain NewcombSince the publication of Serena in 2008 earned him a nomination for the PEN/Faulkner fiction prize, Ron Rash (b. 1953) has gained attention as one of the South's finest writers. Rash draws upon his family's history in Appalachia, where most members have worked with their hands as farmers or millworkers. In the Grit Lit or Rough South genre, Rash maintains a prominent place as a skilled craftsman and triple threat, publishing four collections of poetry, six short story collections, and six novels. Though best known as an Appalachian writer, Rash's reach has grown to extend well beyond Appalachia and the American South, spreading to an international audience. Conversations with Ron Rash collects twenty-two interviews with the award-winning author and provides a look into Rash's writing career from his first collection of short stories, The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth in 1994 through his 2015 novel, Above the Waterfall. The collection includes four interviews from outside the United States, two of which appear in English for the first time. Spanning sixteen years, these interviews demonstrate the disciplined writing process of an expert writer, Rash's views of literature on a local and a global scale, his profound respect for the craft of the written word, and his ongoing goal to connect with his readers.
Conversations with Sam Shepard (Literary Conversations Series)
by Jackson R. Bryer, Robert M. Dowling, and Mary C. HartigA prolific playwright, Sam Shepard (1943–2017) wrote fifty-six produced plays, for which he won many awards, including a Pulitzer Prize. He was also a compelling, Oscar-nominated film actor, appearing in scores of films. Shepard also published eight books of prose and poetry and was a director (directing the premiere productions of ten of his plays as well as two films); a musician (a drummer in three rock bands); a horseman; and a plain-spoken intellectual. The famously private Shepard gave a significant number of interviews over the course of his public life, and the interviewers who respected his boundaries found him to be generous with his time and forthcoming on a wide range of topics. The selected interviews in Conversations with Sam Shepard begin in 1969 when Shepard, already a multiple Obie winner, was twenty-six and end in 2016, eighteen months before his death from complications of ALS at age seventy-three. In the interim, the voice, the writer, and the man evolved, but there are themes that echo throughout these conversations: the indelibility of family; his respect for stage acting versus what he saw as far easier film acting; and the importance of music to his work. He also speaks candidly of his youth in California, his early days as a playwright in New York City, his professionally formative time in London, his interests and influences, the mythology of the American Dream, his own plays, and more. In Conversations with Sam Shepard, the playwright reveals himself in his own words.
Conversations with Sarah Schulman (Literary Conversations Series)
by Will BrantleyThe twenty-four interviews collected in Conversations with Sarah Schulman, roughly a fifth of those that exist, have enabled Schulman to expound upon her distinctive fusion of art and social commitment. Ranging from major forums to smaller venues, and covering a period of more than thirty years, these interviews provide full evidence of Schulman’s value as a pivotal player in the intellectual life of her time. Schulman’s career as a writer, activist, teacher, and oral historian is now in its fifth decade. Spanning multiple fiction genres, her eleven novels include After Delores (1988), Rat Bohemia (1995), The Child (2007), and Maggie Terry (2018). A native New Yorker, Schulman (b. 1958) writes for the people that she writes about—women and men making the most of a society that seems continually marked by homophobia, which Schulman regards as less a phobia than an unacknowledged pleasure system. Readers have come to relish Schulman’s provocations, nowhere more so than through her books of nonfiction on topics such as gentrification and the interlocking nature of conflict and abuse. And since the early 1980s, when Schulman worked as a journalist, readers have come to applaud her searing indictments of the nation’s woeful response to its AIDS crisis. Schulman has received the Kessler Award from CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies in honor of her body of work that has influenced the field of gay and lesbian studies, as well as the Bill Whitehead Award from Publishing Triangle for lifetime achievement. She holds an endowed chair in creative writing at Northwestern University.
Conversations with Stanley Kunitz (Literary Conversations Series)
by Kent P. Ljungquist“He again tops the crowd—he surpasses himself, the old iron brought to the white heat of simplicity.” That's what Robert Lowell said of the poetry of Stanley Kunitz (1905–2006) and his evolving artistry. The interviews and conversations contained in this volume derive from four decades of Kunitz's distinguished career. They touch on aesthetic motifs in his poetry, the roots of his work, his friendships in the sister arts of painting and sculpture, his interactions with Lowell and Theodore Roethke, and his comments on a host of poets: John Keats, Walt Whitman, Randall Jarrell, Wallace Stevens, and Anna Akhmatova. Kunitz emerged from a mid-sized industrial town in central Massachusetts, surviving family tragedy and a sense of personal isolation and loneliness, to become an eloquent spokesman for poetry and for the power of the human imagination. Kunitz has commented, “If we want to know what it felt like to be alive at any given moment in the long odyssey of the race, it is to poetry we must turn.” His own odyssey from “metaphysical loneliness” to a sense of community with fellow writers and artists—by building institutions like Poets House and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts—is ever present in these interviews.
Conversations with Sterling Plumpp (Literary Conversations Series)
by John ZhengConversations with Sterling Plumpp is the first collection of interviews with the renowned poet of Home/Bass and other much-admired works. Spanning thirty years and drawn from literary and scholarly journals and other media, these interviews offer insights into his poetic innovation of blues and jazz and his mastery of black vernacular in poetry. This collection seems fundamental to an understanding of the life and work of an African American poet who has been innovative in fusing blues and jazz rhythms with poetic insight and in vivifying the vernacular landscape of African American poetry.Born in 1940 in Clinton, Mississippi, Plumpp has been living in Chicago since 1962. Home/Bass received the 2014 American Book Award. The finest blues poet of his generation, Plumpp became a model for contemporary poetry and poetics and a leading figure in the tradition of blues/jazz poetry. He continues to reinvent the language while exploring the registers of individual and communal memory and of local, national, and global history. His poetry is important in attempts to define the black aesthetic from the era of the Harlem Renaissance to the seminal Black Arts Movement. It is also important for its re-articulation of the Great Migration, especially expressed by blues musicians who left Mississippi for Chicago.
Conversations with Steve Erickson (Literary Conversations Series)
by Matthew Luter and Mike MileyMuch like his novels, Steve Erickson (b. 1950) exists on the periphery of our perception, a shadow figure lurking on the margins, threatening to break through, but never fully emerging. Despite receiving prestigious honors, Erickson has remained a subterranean literary figure, receiving effusive praise from his fans, befuddled or cautious assessments from reviewers, and scant scholarly attention. Erickson’s obscurity comes in part from the difficulty of categorizing his work within current trends in fiction, and in part from the wide variety of concerns that populate his writing: literature, music, film, politics, history, time, and his fascination with his home city of Los Angeles. His dream-fueled blend of European modernism, American pulp, and paranoid late-century postmodernism makes him essential to an appreciation of the last forty years of American fiction but difficult to classify neatly within that same realm. He is at once thoroughly of his time and distinctly outside it. In these twenty-four interviews Erickson clarifies how his aesthetic and political visions are inextricable from each other. He diagnoses the American condition since World War II, only to reveal that America’s triumphs and failures have been consistent since its inception—and that he presciently described decades ago certain features of our present. Additionally, the interviews expose the remarkable consistency of Erickson’s vision over time while simultaneously capturing the new threads that appear in his later fiction as they emerge in his thought. Conversations with Steve Erickson will deepen readers’ understanding of how Erickson’s books work—and why this utterly singular writer deserves greater attention.
Conversations with Steve Martin (Literary Conversations Series)
by Robert E. KapsisConversations with Steve Martin presents a collection of interviews and profiles that focus on Martin as a writer, artist, and original thinker over the course of more than four decades in show business. While those less familiar with his full body of work may think of Martin as primarily the "wild and crazy guy" with an arrow through his head, this book makes the case that he is in fact one of our nation's most accomplished and varied artists. It shows the full range of Martin's creative work, tracing the source of his comic imagination from his early standup days, starting in the mid to late 1960s through the films he has written and starred in, and emphasizing his more recent creative outpourings as playwright, essayist, novelist, memoirist, songwriter, composer, musician, and art critic. “Standup is the hardest material in the world to write for someone else; it's like trying to condense 10 years of experience into 20 minutes of new material,” Martin says. But commenting on his fiction writing, he says. “I think you have to be able to find as a writer that state where you don't know what you're going to say or what the character is going to say or who the characters are. That's the biggest thrill of all. When you start to trust that subconscious thing and you don't censor yourself—just remember you can always throw it away that's when the good stuff comes out.” The selected materials consist not only of pieces focused primarily on Martin's writings, but also broader profiles and conversations that help explain Martin's development as a writer within the larger context of his many other accomplishments, talents, and performance skills.
Conversations with Strangers (Elements in Sociolinguistics)
by William LabovThis Element documents the evolution of a research program that began in the early 1960s with the author's first investigation of language change on Martha's Vineyard. It traces the development of what has become the basic framework for studying language variation and change. Interviews with strangers are the backbone of this research: the ten American English speakers appearing here were all strangers to the interviewer at the time. They were selected as among the most memorable, from thousands of interviews across six decades. The speakers express their ideas and concerns in the language of everyday life, dealing with their way of earning a living, getting along with neighbors, raising a family – all matters in which their language serves them well. These people speak for themselves. And you will hear their voices. What they have to say is a monument to the richness and variety of the American vernacular, offering a tour of the studies that have built the field of sociolinguistics.
Conversations with Ted Kooser (Literary Conversations Series)
by John CusatisIn twenty-one interviews spanning nearly half a century, Conversations with Ted Kooser chronicles the Nebraska writer’s rise from a regional poet of the Great Plains to a Pulitzer Prize–winning artistic luminary. His candor, clarity, and eloquence, which distinguish Kooser’s plentiful body of work, color these edifying and entertaining conversations. The interviews in Conversations with Ted Kooser are conducted by esteemed poets and critics, radio hosts, and journalists. They discuss Kooser’s life and career as well as his award-winning poetry, prose, and children’s books. The collection includes two previously unpublished interviews, separated by a twenty-year period, with poet/scholar Mary K. Stillwell, author of The Life and Poetry of Ted Kooser, as well as live interviews broadcast on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross and Library of Congress host Grace Cavalieri’s The Poet and the Poem. The book also features thirty of Kooser’s poems, accompanied by his commentary on their genesis. Seventeen of these are drawn from his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Delights & Shadows. Kooser (b. 1939) is a two-term United States Poet Laureate, dedicated to making engaging poetry available to all readers. His syndicated newspaper column, “American Life in Poetry,” begun during his tenure as poet laureate, delivered contemporary poems by poets from across the nation to more than four million readers, long after his laureateship ended. Now in his mid-eighties, Kooser remains highly prolific and internationally popular, continuing to compose life-affirming—and, as many attest, life-changing—poems, celebrating the wonders of the natural world, the subtle grandeur of human connection, and the unifying order he observes in all creation.
Conversations with Terrence McNally (Literary Conversations Series)
by Raymond-Jean FrontainArriving in New York at the tail end of what has been termed the “Golden Age” of Broadway and the start of the Off-Broadway theater movement, Terrence McNally (1938–2020) first established himself as a dramatist of the absurd and a biting social critic. He quickly recognized, however, that one is more likely to change people’s minds by first changing their hearts, and—in outrageous farces like The Ritz and It’s Only a Play—began using humor more broadly to challenge social biases. By the mid-1980s, as the emerging AIDS pandemic called into question America’s treatment of persons isolated by suffering and sickness, he became the theater’s great poet of compassion, dramatizing the urgent need of human connection and the consequences when such connections do not take place. Conversations with Terrence McNally collects nineteen interviews with the celebrated playwright. In these interviews, one hears McNally reflect on theater as the most collaborative of the arts, the economic pressures that drive the theater industry, the unique values of music and dance, and the changes in American theater over McNally’s fifty-plus year career. The winner of four competitive Tony Awards as the author of the Best Play (Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class) and author of the book for the Best Musical (Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime), McNally holds the distinction of being one of the few writers for the American theater who excelled in straight drama as well as musical comedy. In addition, his canon extends to opera; his collaboration with composer Jake Heggie, Dead Man Walking, has proven the most successful new American opera of the last twenty-five years.
Conversations with Texas Writers
by Frances Leonard Ramona CearleyThe writers included here work in a wide variety of genres—novels, short stories, poetry, plays, screenplays, essays, nonfiction, and magazine journalism. In their conversations with interviewers from the Writers' League of Texas and other authors' organizations, the writers speak of their apprenticeships, literary influences, working habits, connections with their readers, and the domestic and public events that have shaped their writing. Accompanying the interviews are excerpts from the writers' work, as well as their photographs, biographies, and bibliographies. Joe Holley's introductory essay—an overview of Texas writing from Cabeza de Vaca's 1542 Relación to the work of today's generation of writers, who are equally at home in Hollywood as in Texas—provides the necessary context to appreciate such a diverse collection of literary voices.
Conversations with Tim Gautreaux (Literary Conversations Series)
by Lamar NislyLouisiana writer Tim Gautreaux (b. 1947) writes fiction that mixes equal parts dry humor, tall tales, and deep tragedy. His stories and novels of working-class Acadiana portray lives of inimitably poignant love, loss, and longing. The depth and complexity of Gautreaux's writing invite scholarly appraisals as well, as critics mine the richness of his moral vision. These interviews reveal the intensity of his sense of place, his deep connection to the mechanical and working world, his commitment to the craft of writing, and his Catholic view that has been shaped by Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy. Conversations with Tim Gautreaux collects interviews from 1993 to 2009 with the author of The Missing, The Clearing, Welding with Children, and many other vital works of fiction. Readers who have been engaged with the themes in his stories and novels will find themselves equally taken with the kind and thoughtful voice they discover in interviews.
Conversations with Tim O'Brien (Literary Conversations Series)
by Patrick A. SmithOn the strength of a National Book Award for his novel Going After Cacciato and a widely acclaimed short-story cycle, The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien (b. 1946) cemented his reputation as one of the most compelling chroniclers of Vietnam—and, in the process, was cast as a “Vietnam writer.” But to confine O’Brien to a single piece of ground or a particular style is to ignore the broad sweep of a career spanning nearly four decades. In addition to detailed discussions of all of O’Brien’s work—a memoir, If I Die in a Combat Zone, and seven books of fiction—the sixteen interviews and profiles in Conversations with Tim O’Brien explore common themes, with subtle differences. Looming large is the experience of Vietnam and its influence as well as O’Brien’s youth in Minnesota and the expectations of a midwestern upbringing. Interviews allowed the writer to fully examine the shifting boundaries of truth and identity, memory, and imagination in fiction; the role of war in society; gender issues; and the craft of writing. O’Brien approaches each of these topics and a host of others with a directness and an evident passion that will resonate with both readers and prospective writers.
Conversations with Todd McFarlane (Conversations with Comic Artists Series)
by Jake ZawlackiOver thirty years after his initial ascent to super stardom, Todd McFarlane (b. 1961) remains one of the most popular and contentious comic artists ever. The interviews compiled in this volume offer a nuanced portrait of McFarlane’s polarizing character. Beginning with his earliest days on Spider-Man to the months before the hotly anticipated release of Spawn and ending with his writing ventures decades later, the interviews offer compelling perspectives from the renowned creator.As the most vocal representative of Image Comics, McFarlane, alongside Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino, Marc Silvestri, and Whilce Portacio, was a veritable rock star. Eager fans swarmed into lengthy lines around comic book stores and conventions, waiting for their chance at a thirty-second autograph. This book offers a glimpse into the comic book world of the early 1990s, a world rampant with variant covers, impossibly exaggerated bodies, and wild speculation about what would be the next comic to explode in value. The volume also includes the momentous public debate between McFarlane and Peter David, former collaborator on The Incredible Hulk, moderated by the late George Pérez at a standing-room-only event at ComicsFest in 1993. While this world sounds almost inconceivable to the comic book fan of today, it was the milieu in which McFarlane rose to stardom and excelled like no other, leaving his mark on the medium forever.
Conversations with Trotsky: Earle Birney and the Radical 1930s (Canadian Literature Collection)
by Bruce NesbittThis collection presents all of Earle Birney’s known published and unpublished writings on Trotsky and Trotskyism for the very first time. It includes their correspondence as well as a selection of Birney’s letters and literary writings. Before he became one of Canada’s most influential and popular twentieth century poets, Earle Birney lived a double life. To his students and colleagues, he was an engaging university lecturer and scholar. But for seven years—from 1933 to 1940—the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was the focus of his writing and much of his life. During his years as a Trotskyist in Canada, the United States and England, Birney wrote extensively about Trotsky, corresponded with him, organized Trotskyist cells in two countries, and recruited on behalf of Trotskyism; he also lectured on Trotsky and interviewed him over the course of several days. One of his two novels is based on some of these activities. The collection traces the origins of Trotsky’s mistrust of “the British” to his experiences in Canada; shows Birney’s influence on a major shift in Trotsky’s policy of “entrism” in British politics; includes the largest body of Trotskyist criticism in Canadian literary history; and demonstrates the need for a radical re-reading of Birney’s poetry in light of his Trotskyism.
Conversations with Vladimir Nabokov (Literary Conversations Series)
by Robert GollaConversations with Vladimir Nabokov brings together candid, revealing interviews with one of the twentieth century’s master prose writers. Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) was a Russian American scientist, poet, translator, and professor of literature. Critics throughout the world celebrated him for developing the luminous and enigmatic style that advanced the boundaries of modern literature more than any author since James Joyce. In a career that spanned over six decades, he produced dozens of iconic works, including Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and his classic autobiography, Speak, Memory.The twenty-eight interviews and profiles in this collection were drawn from Nabokov’s numerous print and broadcast appearances over a period of nineteen years. Beginning with the controversy surrounding the American publication of Lolita in 1958, he offers trenchant, witty views on society, literature, education, the role of the author, and a range of other topics. He discusses the numerous literary and symbolic allusions in his work, his use of parody and satire, as well as analyses of his own literary influences.Nabokov also provided a detailed portrait of his life—from his aristocratic childhood in prerevolutionary Russia, education at Cambridge, apprenticeship as an émigré writer in the capitals of Europe, to his decision in 1940 to immigrate to the United States, where he achieved renown and garnered an international readership. The interviews in this collection are essential for seeking a clearer understanding of the life and work of an author who was pivotal in shaping the landscape of contemporary fiction.
Conversations with W. S. Merwin (Literary Conversations Series)
by Michael Wutz and Hal CrimmelConversations with W. S. Merwin is the first collection of interviews with former United States Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin (b. 1927). Spanning almost six decades of conversations, the collection touches on such topics as Merwin's early influences (Robert Graves and Ezra Pound), his location within the twin poles of Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, and his extraordinary work as a translator, as well as his decades-long interest in environmental conservation. Anticipating the current sustainability movement and the debates surrounding major and minor literatures, Merwin was, and still is, a visionary.He is among the most distinguished poets, translators, and thinkers in the United States. A major link between the period of literary modernism and its contemporary extensions, Merwin has been a force in American letters for many decades, and his translations from the Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, and other languages have earned him unanimous praise and admiration. Merwin also wrote at the forefront of literature's environmental advocacy and early on articulated concerns about ecology and sustainability.Conversations with W. S. Merwin offers insight into the various dimensions of Merwin's thought by treating his interviews as a self-standing category in his oeuvre. More than casual narratives that interpret the occasional poem or relay an occasional experience, they afford literary and cultural historians a view into the larger throughlines of Merwin's thinking.