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Overview
The twelve contemporary fiction writers interviewed in Passion and Craft go beyond the usual chatting about career and technique, beyond the merely autobiographical. Readers will discover many personal and artistic differences: T. Coraghessan Boyle's self-aware hipness, Andre Dubus's spiritual strength in the face of physical disability. Rick Bass's commitment to environmental concerns. Richard Ford, a recent winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN-Faulkner Award, describes how he takes control over his own material; and, in one of the few lengthy interviews she has ever granted, Gina Berriault, the 1997 winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award, speaks movingly about the "gaps and silences" in a woman writer's life.Synopsis
The twelve contemporary fiction writers interviewed in Passion and Craft go beyond the usual chatting about career and technique, beyond the merely autobiographical. Readers will discover many personal and artistic differences: T. Coraghessan Boyle's self-aware hipness, Andre Dubus's spiritual strength in the face of physical disability. Rick Bass's commitment to environmental concerns. Richard Ford, a recent winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN-Faulkner Award, describes how he takes control over his own material; and, in one of the few lengthy interviews she has ever granted, Gina Berriault, the 1997 winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award, speaks movingly about the "gaps and silences" in a woman writer's life.
Library Journal
Two English professors have edited unsigned interviews with 12 contemporary fiction writers: Julia Alvarez, Rick Bass, Gina Berriault, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Andre Dubus, Richard Ford, Thom Jones, Bobbie Ann Mason, Leonard Michaels, Jayne Anne Phillips, Chirstopher Tilghman, and Tobias Wolff. They intentionally sought a cross-section of authors. Because the interviews aim to find out "what matters most to these writers as writers," they ask such things as "Is Dede's politicalization anticipated in the scene in which she claims to be Minerva?" or "Do you think that your sensibility is scatological?" Earlier versions of most of the interviews have been published in such journals as Paris Review and the Literary Review. For more polished interviews that synthesize this type of information better, see the "Writing for Your Life" series (edited by Sybil Steinberg and Jonathan Bing, Pushcart Press). For larger American literature collections.Nancy Patterson Shires, East Carolina Univ., Greenville, NC