-
PW: Tom Drury: American Strains of Humor
When the light is just right, you can see two faint scars crossing Tom Drury's face like insignias of the hardscrabble lives that populate his fiction.
-
PW: Quiet Times for a Crusader: Jonathan Kozol
As the road slopes up into a curve, on the right you'll see a stone wall. Behind that wall is a house that looks like a nutshell, with diamond-shaped windows. That's where my dog and I live," explains Jonathan Kozol, giving a visitor directions to his home in Byfield, a small, sleepy town near Boston's north shore.
-
PW: In the Belly of the Beast: Ted Conover
PW Home Bestsellers Subscribe Search Interview In the Belly of the Beast: Ted ConoverNorman Oder -- 5/8/00"I feel a writer's real job is to be out therewith people who are strange to you." In 1997, sporting a crew cut some friends misconstrued as "downtown hip," Ted Conover drove daily from his Bronx home to the infamous Sing Sing prison, the tension of his guard's job compounded by the enforced secrecy of his writer's quest. Last month, his hair again civilian-length, ex-Correctional Office
-
Amiri Baraka: Fierce Fictions, Radical Truths
As the car carrying PW's interviewer proceeds through Newark, N.J.'s black neighborhoods, one recognizes many of the street names--Hillside, Central Avenue, Newark Street--that crop up in Amiri Baraka's fiction.
-
PW: Alistair MacLeod: Of Scotsmen in Canada
PW Home Bestsellers Subscribe Search Interview Alistair MacLeod: Of Scotsmen in CanadaLeah Eichler -- 4/24/00"The truth is just boring...You don't need autobiographical truth. Just real stories." Even before Alistair MacLeod's first novel, No Great Mischief, was released in Canada last year, the story of its origins had made its way into the annals of publishing folklore. ...
-
PW: Roger Shattuck: A Life of Sentences
PW Home Bestsellers Subscribe Search Interview Roger Shattuck: A Life of SentencesAmy Boaz -- 4/17/00"I read Proust kind of late. He won't go away." Roger Shattuck d sn't walk--he bounds. As the spry 76-year-old scholar leads PW across an open field of melting snow to his study, a hut perched at the edge of a primeval forest in the shadow of the Green Mountains of Vermont, he barely pauses to navigate puddles. ...
-
Anne Carson: Poetry Without Borders
Anne Carson's house in the Berkeley hills, hard by the university campus, a mint-green fence defends the high, pale greenery of a raw Bay Area spring. The plants hide the glass front door from the street, so Carson can work at her front window unseen. On her diminutive, sunlit writing desk is Edmund Burke's Philosophical Inquiry into the Sources of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful. Sinuous '50s jazz fills the kitchen. It's a neat, bright space for a scholar and poet, but Carson is quick to explain that it's not really hers: after spending the fall at the University of Michigan writing an opera, Carson is staying here for one semester in Berkeley: in the fall she returns to McGill University in Montreal, where she teaches ancient Greek.
-
PW: Beth Gutcheon: Serious Romance
Sitting with Beth Gutcheon in her spacious TriBeCa loft, it's easy to see where her characters and themes come from.
-
PW: Stephen Harrigan: Re-visioning the Alamo
PW Home Bestsellers Subscribe Search Interview Stephen Harrigan: Re-visioning the AlamoRoger Gathman -- 3/20/00"The last thing you want to read about, in a way, is the Alamo." Stephen Harrigan's two-story house is located in the Terrytown section of Austin, an older residential neighborhood of ranch houses favored by professors and professionals. ...
-
PW: Christopher Nolan: Against All Odds
Conversation in the Nolan household in the village of Sutton on the north shore of Dublin Bay goes three ways on a two-lane street.
-
PW: Matt Ridley: The Evolution of a Darwinian
Will maniacal parents soon be plucking up the best genes money can buy to add to Junior's pre-K regimen of French class, ERB tutor and Ritalin?
-
PW: Colin Thubron: The Art of Traveling Well
Not all travel writers travel equally well from one side of the Atlantic to the other, even if the subtlety of their observations and seductiveness of their words argue that they should.
-
PW: Michael Eric Dyson: Of Heroes and Hip-hop
PW talks with professor Michael Eric Dyson, about his new book, 'I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King Jr.,' a lively examination King's overlooked radical political and social vision for America and of his flawed personal life.
-
PW: Suzanne Fisher Staples: Under Eastern Skies
"She has no trouble finding her way around the Cholistan desert, but she can't figure out the streets of Harrisburg, Pa.," Suzanne Fisher Staples murmurs, poking fun at herself.
-
PW: Nicholas Christopher: Trips to the Other Side
When Nicholas Christopher was 11, a strange woman lived in a yellow house a few doors down his street.
-
PW: Alice Elliott Dark: Inside the Ordinary
Alice Elliott Dark brightens when PW asks about her pop culture intake.
-
PW: Herbert Mitgang: History in a Handshake
In a small den filled with books, mementos of a legendary writing career and the requisite command-and-control center (telephone, computer, fax and copy machine), Herbert Mitgang sips on a sherry and offers the secret of his success: "Poverty and idealism," he says with a delightful smile.
-
PW: Gail Anderson-Dargatz: Writing in Canadian
PW Home Bestsellers Subscribe Search Interview Gail Anderson-Dargatz: Writing in CanadianAlissa Quart -- 1/17/00I don' spend a lot of time with writers. I don't think it's healthy. You're a vegetarian?" asks Gail Anderson-Dargatz, as she leads PW into her cottage, buried deep in the arcadian heart of Vancouver Island. "Well, in my family, we think it's most respectful to eat animals whose first names you know. ...
-
PW: Jeffrey Toobin: A Beltway Tale of High and Low
The term subpoena duces tecum doesn't usually turn heads at a restaurant, but it does as PW lunches with journalist, author and TV news correspondent Jeffrey Toobin at Ruby Foo's, a popular Upper West Side eatery in Manhattan.
-
PW: George Pelecanos: Hard-boiled Family Values
George Pelecanos is perhaps the most prolific of contemporary Washington novelists, publishing eight books set in the District of Columbia in as many years.
Browse archive by date:
