"The Paris Review interviews have always provided the best look into the minds and work ethics of great writers
and when read together constitute the closest thing to an MFA that you can get while sitting alone on your couch."
Dave Eggers

From Salman Rushdie's daring rhetorical question "why shouldn't literature provoke?" to Joyce Carol Oates's thrilling comments about her own prolific output, The Paris Review has elicited revelatory and revealing thoughts from our most accomplished novelists, poets and playwrights. How did Georges Simenon manage to write around six books a year, what was it like for Jan Morris to write as both a man and a woman, what influences moved Ralph Ellison to write Invisible Man? In the pages of The Paris Review, writers give more than simple answers; they offer
uncommon candour, depth and wit in interviews that have become the gold standard of the literary Q&A.

With an introduction by Margaret Atwood, this volume brings together another rich, varied crop of literary voices, including Martin Amis, Norman Mailer, Raymond Carver, John Cheever, Harold Pinter and more.

"This is a bible both for readers and writers, the insider gossip for those who are truly passionate about their prose." Observer

"If you only want to get acquainted with your favourite writer, you could go to a reading or a book-signing. But to really know them, you should read a Paris Review interview." The Times