Links to author interviews

The Dalkey Archive has some good author interviews here, including some with local favorites like David Markson. The interview with the cranky Felipe Alfau is a personal favorite.

There is a also a good interview with, em, Gilbert Sorrentino.

The Paris Review has slowly been posting their complete archive of author interviews to their website as PDFs. So far up to the 1970s. They seem to be running a little behind schedule as orginally the 80s were supposed to be posted in August, but they've just updated that to December. Anyway, it's amazing the authors they've interviewed over the years and that they are now making this stuff available for free. One can't complain. View here.

Lannan Audio Archive has lots of interesting real audio interviews and readings available. Even the above mentioned Gilbert Sorrentino! Plus lots of other heavyweights, like William Gass, DFW and Susan Sontag etc...

PENNsound has interview-like-things for poets like Jackson Mac Low and novelists like Raymond Federman.

The Ellison interview on the Paris Review site is great, great reading.

Choice bits:

“All novels are about certain minorities: The individual is a minority. The universal in the novel – and isn’t that what we’re all clamoring for these days? – is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.”

“The clue to this can be found in folklore, which offers the first drawings of any group’s character. It preserves mainly those situations which have repeated themselves again and again in the history of any given group. It describes those rites, manners, customs, and so forth, which insure the good life, or destroy it; and it describes those boundaries of feeling, thought and action which that particular group has found to be the limitations of the human condition (…) The hero of Dostojevsky’s “Notes From Underground” and the hero of Gogol’s “The Overcoat” appear in their rudimentary forms far back in Russian folklore. French literature has never ceased exploring the nature of the Frenchman. Or take Picasso…Why, he’s the greatest wrestler with forms and techniques of them all. Just the same, he’s never abandoned the old symbolic forms of Spanish art: the guitar, the bull, daggers, women, shawls, mirrors.”

“Our so-called-race problem has now lined up with the world problems of colonialism and the struggle of the West to gain the allegiance of the remaining non-white people who have thus far remained outside the communist sphere; thus its possibilities for art have increased rather than lessened”.

Powells' author-interview archive, is a trove and a half: http://www.powells.com/authors/interviews.html

Hmm... I'd never noticed the Powells' one before - thanks!

I just remembered another large batch of generally lengthy interviews can be found at Identity Theory.

From what I'm seeing this isn't strictly writers, but Robert Birnbaum's "Birnbaum Vs." column on The Morning News seems very geared toward them. Archive here: http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/birnbaum_v/index.php

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This seems like a good place to ask a question I was going to start another thread for: Who else here is a fan of books of Q&As? I am a huge fan of the straightforward interview format and suspect that at the rate I'm going I'll end up with a shelf just for Q&As.

The Playboy Interview collections are great starting points, though I only have Vol. 2 (a mid-'80s paperback), and so are the numerous Paris Interview author-interview collections. The Rolling Stone Interview books ('70s and '80s) are standbys, the '70s more than the '80s (they've never done a '90s one, for good reason I'd imagine), and I like some of the book-length ones I have, in particular this one of Gore Vidal that's entirely made up of Q/As from various sources stitched together with some supplemental material. It came out in the late '70s, I believe. Movie-director Q/As are easy to find and often pretty interesting; I have the two recent Bogdonavich collections and the Cameron Crowe/Billy Wilder but haven't read them too closely yet. And The New New Journalism is pretty great so far.

What say y'all?

matos you would love this, I think:

Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut. film-by-film discussion.

"the mother of all book-length interviews"

yeah, I have that. it's definitely one of the first--maybe the first? groundbreaking at least, and much-copied (see Wilder/Crowe). I haven't read it in ages--did so when I was a kid (9 or 10) and remember enjoying it, should go back and see if I actually understand any of it now!

(oh, and regarding the original topic: http://www.indexmagazine.com/ has a few good ones)

this guy keeps busy:

http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews/

I think that's the same guy I linked upthread at themorningnews.