How to Read a Novelist
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
How to Read a Novelist is the ultimate booklovers book.
John Freeman, author and editor of Granta magazine, has interviewed nearly every name in fiction and the literary world. In this collection Freeman has compiled the most insightful and fascinating of his interviews, essays and articles.
Paul Theroux on the state of sex in America, Margaret Atwood as inventor, John Updike as relationship advisor and Geoff Dyer as England's hippest middle-aged novelist, among many others including Philip Roth, Siri Hustevdt, Doris Lessing, Kirin Desai, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Tom Wolfe and Peter Carey.
John Freeman is an award-winning writer and book critic who has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Guardian and the Wall Street Journal. Freeman won the 2007 James Patterson Pageturner Award. He is the editor-in-chief of Granta and lives in New York City.
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‘If only I had this book at the start of my career–what falls and confusion I would have been spared–a gift for readers and for writers.’ Junot Díaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
List of interviews, articles, essays:
Toni Morrison, 2004
Jonathan Safran Foer, 2005
Haruki Murakami, 2008
Richard Ford, 2007
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 2006
Günter Grass, 2007
Nadine Gordimer, 2007
David Foster Wallace, 2006
Khaled Hosseini, 2007
Doris Lessing, 2006
Hisham Matar, 2007
Siri Hustvedt & Paul Auster, 2008
Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005
Charles Frazier, 2006
Edmund White, 2005
Geraldine Brooks, 2008
Imre Kertész, 2004
Oliver Sacks, 2007
Kiran Desai, 2006
Philip Roth, 2006
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 2006
Dave Eggers, 2005
Vikram Chandra, 2007
Adrienne Rich, 2006
Tom Wolfe, 2004
Robert M. Pirsig, 2006
Elif Shafak, 2007
Peter Carey, 2008
Mo Yan, 2012
Donna Leon, 2005
John Updike, 2003
Seamus Heaney, 2006
Joyce Carol Oates, 2007
Paul Theroux, 2005
Don DeLillo, 2006
Louise Erdrich, 2008
Norman Mailer, 2007
James Wood, 2008
Margaret Atwood, 2006
Mohsin Hamid, 2007
Richard Powers, 2006
Alan Hollinghurst, 2004
Ian McEwan, 2005
Caryl Phillips, 2005
Wole Soyinka, 2007
Salman Rushdie, 2005
Jim Crace, 2007
Marilynne Robinson, 2012
Edmundo Paz Soldán, 2006
Amitav Ghosh, 2008
Ayu Utami, 2006
Frank McCourt, 2005
Sebastian Junger, 2006
Geoff Dyer, 2003
A. S. Byatt, 2005
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Award-winning writer and critic Freeman (The Tyranny of Email), editor-in-chief of Granta, has collected 55 interviews in which the great literary lights of our time "explain what it is they don't want left out." In pithy, penetrating profiles, Freeman discusses "the consolation of narrative" with a diverse roster of authors including Richard Ford, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Aleksandar Hemon, David Foster Wallace, Mohsin Hamid, Marilynne Robinson, Ayu Utami, Jonathan Franzen, Jennifer Egan, Mo Yan, Philip Roth, and many more. In an insightful preface, Freeman describes the allure of the biographical sketch: we read about our favorite writers because we want to understand how a disembodied, imaginative world emerges from the body of the artist. At the same time, it would be foolish to insist that the details of an author's life and writing can explain the mysteries of fiction, or vice versa. To read about the personal, emotional, mental, political, and artistic struggles and triumphs of great writers is to see them as flesh and blood human beings, but that is not the same as understanding how and why people succeed in making transcendent art. These intimate and thoughtful sketches are supplementary pieces to that transcendent work.