The Paris Review Interviews, I
You won't be able to get their rueful, witty, snappish, and thoughtful voices out of your head. Here is Dorothy Parker, breathtakingly funny, brilliant, and self-deprecating. Truman Capote purring, "I am a completely horizontal author. I cannot think unless I'm lying down." Hemingway, recalcitrant and dismissive, dueling with George Plimpton in a revealing conversation containing the famous iceberg remark about writing: "There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows." As for poets, Donald Hall speaks with an urbane T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Spires with a bemusedly frank Elizabeth Bishop. Here, too, is an astonishing conversation with the erudite and gentlemanly Jorge Luis Borges, who speaks of Old Norse, Henry James, and the color yellow, and flinty Kurt Vonnegut remembering the bombing of Dresden and telling bad jokes. Several hundred of theParis Review's justifiably celebrated literary interviews are available online, but these 16 exceptional slices of literary history belong in the form the interviewees devoted their lives to, namely a finely made book, always at hand, always compelling.Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved