How to Read a Novelist
Critic and former Granta editor Freeman (The Tyranny of E-Mail, 2009) presents a collection of 55 deeply informed and closely observed encounters with exceptional novelists. After stumbling through his first interview with John Updike, Freeman learned that “an interview is a form of conversation that has the same relationship to talking as fiction does to life.” Over the subsequent 13 years, Freeman spoke confidently with novelists who have something “to say about the world that can only be said in a story”in conversations he deftly wove into compact yet defining literary newspaper  profiles. And what a spectrum he covers, from such towering figures as Toni Morrison, Nadine Gordimer, Joyce Carol Oates, and Günter Grass to Aleksandar Hemon, Kiran Desai, crime writer Donna Leon, and Jonathan Franzen. Haruki Murakami explains why a “repetitious life” is good for the imagination. E. L. Doctorow talks about the balance between the imagined and the historic, and Kazuo Ishiguro comments on the mess Freeman makes while eating scones. Ranging from the profound to the amusing,Freeman eloquently appreciates novelists and the “consolations of narrative.” --Donna Seaman