This paperback original is a kind of best-of remix: 16 interviews selected from the echt lit mag’s 53-year history, the most recent never before published in book form, from Dorothy Parker (Issue 13, 1956) to Joan Didion (Issue 176, 2006). The “writers at work” series, of course, has long been manna for critics, fans, or the would-be novelist or poet and creative-writing-workshop addict intent on getting a behind-the-text look at the creative process as well as a peak at the more mundane aspects of work habits and routines. Here, it allows us to ask the question, as Philip Roth once put it in a PR interview, “Is he as crazy as I am?” What delights in this first of a projected three-volume series, is the inclusion of the obvious Pulitzer- and Nobel-heavyweights (Bellow, Borges, Hemingway, Elizabeth Bishop) alongside less likely subjects as poet Jack Gilbert, editor Robert Gottlieb, and noir master James M. Cain, who offers: “Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It’s not all inspiration.”
Related:
Lions and lambs, Tripping, Poetic license, More 
- Lions and lambs
The season is notable for the return to bookstores of canonical names like Atwood, Ginsberg, Kinnell, le Carré, Munro, Pynchon, and Vidal plus a fair share of younger lions like Eggers, Julavits, and Muldoon.
- Tripping
A handful of this year’s travel books seem an odd, almost ghoulish enactment of Rene Descartes’s statement that “Traveling is almost like talking with men of other centuries.”
- Poetic license
For generations, moony adolescents have stoked their feelings of being sensitive and misunderstood by moping around reading poetry.
- Theatrical progress
As an avid theater-goer, there are times when I hanker to positively consume a fine play.
- Joan Didion on stage, Spalding Gray on the page
The 90-minute theater piece differs from the memoir in ways other than its relative slimness. It's more of a linear journey.
- Yule logs
From $16 paperbacks to $120 collector’s items, we’ve come up with a range of selections that should cover everyone on your list — from former classics majors and music fans to future art critics and lovers of high-fashion soft-core.
- Doodle bugs
Every teen mag worth its weight in heartthrobs can tell you what your notebook doodlings reveal about your personality.
- Good reads
According to the Greeks, spring is the season of rebirth, when Persephone was released from Hades and mom Demeter celebrated with flowers.
- Positively Phil
We all know Philip Roth’s preoccupations.
- Magic tricks
You have to give a seventysomething writer credit for daring to begin a book with “He’d lost his magic.”
- Year in Books: Word plays
Here, listed alphabetically by author, are 10 of the best works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry that the Phoenix wrote about in 2008.
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Topics:
Books
, Media, Books, Elizabeth Bishop, More
, Media, Books, Elizabeth Bishop, Poetry, Dorothy Parker, James M. Cain, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, Jack Gilbert, JON GARELICK Book, Less
