A self-publishing hero goes the traditional route and sign for a publisher.
From the NY TIME
By JULIE BOSMAN
If any writer proved that modern self-publishing could be a pretty sweet deal, it was Amanda Hocking. Continue reading »
Mar 312011
Yesterday, the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. The mention read: “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat”.
Buy Mario Vargas Llosa’s books at Amazon.co.uk
This morning I read an interesting essay on Vargas Llosa. It was published by the NY Times.
An Appraisal: A Storyteller Enthralled by the Power of Art
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
At first glance, Mario Vargas Llosa’s novels seem like a one-man miscellany of subjects and styles: There are harrowing narratives based on historical events like Rafael Trujillo’s tyrannical rule over the Dominican Republic (“The Feast of the Goat”) and a 19th-century religious uprising in the backlands of Brazil (“The War of the End of the World”). Continue reading »
Sep 132010
PHILIP ROTH
| The Art of Fiction No. 84 |
| Interviewed by Hermione Lee |
| Issue 93, Fall 1984 |
Purchase this issue |
| View a manuscript page |
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| I met Philip Roth after I had published a short book about his work for the Methuen Contemporary Writers Series. He read the book and wrote me a generous letter. After our first meeting, he sent me the fourth draft of The Anatomy Lesson, which we later talked about, because, in the final stages of writing a novel, Roth likes to get as much criticism and response as he can from a few interested readers. Just after he finished The Anatomy Lesson we began the Paris Review interview. We met in the early summer of 1983 at the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall, where Roth occasionally takes a room to work in when he’s visiting England. The room had been turned into a small, meticulously organized office—IBM golf-ball typewriter, alphabetical file holders, Anglepoise lamps, dictionaries, aspirin, copyholder, felt-tip pens for correcting, a radio—with a few books on the mantelpiece, among them the recently published autobiography by Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope, Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, Leonard Woolf’s autobiography, David Magarshaek’s Chekhov, John Cheever’s Oh What a Paradise It Seems, Fordyce’s Behavioral Methods for Chronic Pain and Illness (useful for Zuckerman), Claire Bloom’s autobiography, Limelight and After, and some Paris Review interviews. We talked in this businesslike cell for a day and a half, pausing only for meals. I was looked after with great thoughtfulness. Roth’s manner, which matches his appearance—subdued, conventional clothes, gold-rimmed spectacles, the look of a quiet professional American visitor to London, perhaps an academic or a lawyer—is courteous, mild, and responsive. He listens carefully to everything, makes lots of quick jokes, and likes to be amused. Just underneath this benign appearance there is a ferocious concentration and mental rapacity; everything is grist for his mill, no vagueness is tolerated, differences of opinion are pounced on greedily, and nothing that might be useful is let slip. Thinking on his feet, he develops his ideas through a playful use of figurative language—as much as a way of avoiding confessional answers (though he can be very direct) as of interesting himself. The transcripts from this taped conversation were long, absorbing, funny, disorganized, and repetitive. I edited them down to a manageable size and sent my version on to him. Then there was a long pause while he went back to America and The Anatomy Lesson was published. Early in 1984, on his next visit to England, we resumed; he revised my version and we talked about the revision until it acquired its final form. I found this process extremely interesting. The mood of the interview had changed in the six months between his finishing a novel and starting new work; it became more combative and buoyant. And the several drafts in themselves displayed Roth’s methods of work: raw chunks of talk were processed into stylish, energetic, concentrated prose, and the return to past thoughts generated new ideas. The result provides an example, as well as an account, of Philip Roth’s presentation of himself.—Hermione Lee |
The Paris Review - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE INDEX
Some of the interviews:
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD The Art of Fiction No. 49 – full interview 
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR The Art of Fiction No. 35 – full interview
FRANCOISE SAGAN – The Art of Fiction No. 15 – full interview
KURT VONNEGUT The Art of Fiction No. 64
PHILIP ROTH The Art of Fiction No. 84
MARGUERITE YOURCENAR – The Art of Fiction No. 103 full interview