How to Read a Novelist
Conversations with Writers
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- 3,49 €
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- 3,49 €
Publisher Description
For the last fifteen years, if a novel was published, John Freeman has been there to greet it. As a critic for more than two hundred newspapers worldwide, he has reviewed thousands of books and interviewed scores of writers, and in How to Read a Novelist, he shares with us what he has learned.
From such international stars as Doris Lessing, Haruki Murakami, Salman Rushdie and Mo Yan; to British talents including Ian McEwan, Jim Crace, A. S. Byatt and Alan Hollinghurst; American masters such as Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth; to the new guard of Jennifer Egan, Junot Díaz, Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen – Freeman has talked to everyone.
How to Read a Novelist is essential reading for every aspiring writer and engaged reader; the perfect companion for anyone who's ever curled up with a novel and wanted to know a bit more about the person who made that moment possible.
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.
