Writers & Company - Softcover

Wachtel, Eleanor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0156001128 ISBN 13: 9780156001120

Publisher: Harcourt, 1994

About this title

Review:

Interviews with authors including Margaret Atwood, Russell Banks, A. S. Byatt, Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Andre Dubus, Cynthia Ozick, and Amy Tan. Wachtel's show, Writers & Company is heard in Minnesota on MPR and in 31 other states through the cable radio network. She's as good in print as she is on the air.

From Publishers Weekly:

Amy Hempel believes that ' ' personal catharsis is a terrible reason for writing fiction." Amy Tan says she writes about things "for my own reasons, not for literary reasons." Who's right? Don't expect any answers from Wachtel: her job isn't to pass judgment but to draw out her subjects, a skill she's honed as host of the Canadian Broadcast Company's (CBC) radio program from which the book's 21 interviews have been taken. The conversations follow a fairly predictable pattern, covering each writer's (often traumatic) childhood, an overview of his or her work and the occasional social commentary. There are some funny insights and some surprising ones. Margaret Atwood describes her teenage poetry as sounding "like Edgar Allan Poe on a very bad day," Amos Oz jokes he hadn't been aware of the Wizard of Oz but "now of course I'm aware that he must have been my great-uncle or something," and Cynthia Ozick flouts the "write what you know" theory, demanding, "Why can't I write anything I goddamn please?" It's a fine introduction to some of today's best authors and an ideal teaching tool--these up close and personal looks at what successful writers go through is at least as helpful as those you've-lived-it-now-write-it guides proliferating in bookstores everywhere.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harcourt
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0156001128
• ISBN 13: 9780156001120
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 301