Product Description
Sixteen of the world's great women writers speak about their work, their colleagues, and their lives.

For More Than Forty Years, the acclaimed Paris Review interviews have been collected in the Writers at Work series. The Modern Library relaunches the series with the first of its specialized collections -- interviews with sixteen women novelists, poets, and playwrights, all offering rich commentary on the art of writing and on the opportunities and challenges a woman writer faces in contemporary society.

"The editors and interviewers of the Writers at Work series have become curators of live genius, marvelous literary taxidermists who have discovered a way to mount the great minds of their day without the usual killing and stuffing, to preserve them for all time. Surely this is now one of the single most persistent acts of cultural conservation in the history of the world, and one of our great national resources."

-- Joe David Bellamy,

Writing at the End of the Millennium

"Aspiring writers should read the entire canon of literature that precedes them, back to the Greeks, up to the current issue of The Paris Review."

-- William Kennedy

"It is a safe bet that thirty and even three hundred years from now these conversations will be invaluable to students of twentieth-century literature."

-- TimeAmazon.com Review
"What is it about interviews that attracts us?" Margaret Atwood asks in herintroduction to this collection of 16 interviews from The ParisReview. "Specifically, what is it about interviews with writers?"Women Writers at Work may not answer that question, but it raisesmany, many more--and allows the writers included in this volume to speak forthemselves. For decades the Paris Review has been interviewingauthors of both genders and every literary stripe, and many of theseinterviews have been collected together in volumes like this one. This,however, is the first time the Writers at Work series has dedicated itselfto one gender only. In this volume readers will find insightful interviewswith Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, Dorothy Parker,P.L. Travers, Simone de Beauvoir, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bishop, MaryMcCarthy, Nadine Gordimer, Maya Angelou, Anne Sexton, Toni Morrison, SusanSontag, Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates.

The Paris Review is famous for getting authors to open up. Thesubjects here offer honest, often provocative opinions about themselves(Dorothy Parker on her humorous verses: "I read my verses now and I ain'tfunny. I haven't been funny for twenty years"); each other (Mary McCarthyon "women writers": "Katherine Anne Porter? Don't think she really is--Imean her writing is certainly very feminine, but I would say that therewasn't the 'WW' business in Katherine Anne Porter"); and writing itself(Toni Morrison: "What makes me feel I belong here, out in this world, isnot the teacher, not the mother, not the lover but what goes on in my mindwhen I'm writing"). The end result is a fascinating glimpse into thesewriters' minds and works. --Margaret Prior ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Nectar and Wormwood
Most readers will first of all be most drawn to the photographs of the sixteen women writers interviewed in The Paris Review's Women Writers at Work. But there are other visual clues to the personalities of the women whose words we are about to read, including a swift evocation of the writer in her lair--her view, her books, her style, her looks--along with a page from a work-in-progress, often heavily annotated.

Rebecca West's page is decorated with line after line of a script so microscopic it looks like miniature embroidery while Anne Sexton's poem is uncorrected and drifts definitely eastward. The manuscript page submitted by P.L. Travers has a drawing of a snail posed against a beach of text while Elizabeth Bishop's page looks untidy and musical. Mary McCarthy's page, on the other hand, has been typewritten, and of its five corrections, three have been typed in, with the consequence that we are given very little sense of how she works when she's alone and feeling spontaneous. And yet the interview with McCarthy is marvellously opinionated and candid; she also gives an intriguing answer to the interviewer who asks her what she thinks of the category "woman writer" by first defining a certain kind of "woman writer" (WW, as she puts it): "I think they become interested in decor. You notice the change in Elizabeth Bowen. Her early work in much more masculine. Her later work has much more drapery in it."

And so it's with apologies to Mary McCarthy that this reviewer is going to do what the WW's do and describe--in the present tense although many of the writers are now dead--some of the living arrangement of several of the writers in Women Writers at Work: P.L. Travers' front door is pink, the same pink as the cover of Mary Poppins at Cherry Tree Lane, and in her hallway there's an antique rocking horse. In Rebecca West's hallway there a drawing of her by Wyndham Lewis, done in the thirties. ("Before the ruin.") Toni Morrison's office at Princeton is decorated with a large Helen Frankenthaler print, pen-and-ink drawings that an architect did of all the houses that appear in Morrison's work, a few framed book-jacket covers and a note of apology from Hemingway, a forgery meant as a joke. Susan Sontag lives in a nearly unfurnished apartment in Manhattan, but she is the owner of over 15,000 books. Eudora Welty will not discuss her private life and is, in any case, interviewed in a hotel room. And Maya Angelou can only work in hotel rooms; she insists that the staff take down all the pictures and she will not permit the maids to come in to change the pillow cases and sheets.

Are any of these writers poor? They don't seem to be. With the possible exception of Dorothy Parker who says, "I hate almost all rich people, but I think I would be darling at it." Parker also shares a small New York City apartment with a youthful poodle that has the run of the place and has caused it to look, as she apologetically says, "somewhat Hogarthian."

In their opinions of other writers they are both scathing and generous; Dorothy Parker says she so much wants to write well, "though I know I don't. But during and at the end of my life I will adore those who have." Marianne Moore says of William Carlos Williams, "He is willing to be reckless; if you can't be that, what's the point of the whole thing?" Susan Sontag responds to being asked if she minds being called an intellectual by saying "Well, one never likes to be called anything. And I suppose there will always be a presumption of graceless oddity--especially if one is a woman." Nadine Gordimer feels that the solitude of writing is "quite frightening. It's quite close, sometimes, to madness.. the ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's.. is a very sane and good thing to do." Elizabeth Bishop tells us that when she was a student at Vassar she believed that if she ate a lot of cheese before going to bed she would have fascinating dreams; this conviction led to her keeping a huge hunk of Roquefort cheese in the bottom of her bookcase. Anne Sexton, speaking of Robert Lowell's gifts as a teacher, says that he "worked with a cold chisel, with no more mercy than a dentist. He got out the decay, but if he was never kind to a poem, he was kind to the poet."

Marianne Moore talks of her longing to write plays. "To me the theatre is the most pleasant, in fact my favourite, form of recreation."

INTERVIEWER: Do you go often?

MOORE: No, never.

Rebecca West, at the time of her interview, is in her late eighties. She wears a bright caftan; her eyes are penetrating; she wears two pairs of spectacles on chains like necklaces; she wears beautiful rings. She is also too old to monitor herself, and so she's a particular delight to read. She thinks T. S. Eliot a poseur and says of Somerset Maugham, "He couldn't write for toffee, bless his heart." But when the conversation moves on to Arnold Bennett and the interviewer tells West that her reviews of Bennett's work were absolutely sparkling--"I love the essay you wrote about The Uncles"--West says, "Oh, Bennett was horrible about it. He was a horrible, mean-spirited, hateful man. I hated Arnold Bennett."

INTERVIEWER: But you were very nice about him.

WEST: Well, I thought so, and I think he was sometimes a very good writer. And I do think The Old Wives' Tale was very good, don't you? He was a horrible man.

INTERVIEWER: Was he in a position to make things difficult for you then?

WEST: Yes, he was not nice....

And so it goes. Katherine Anne Porter is scathing about the nineteen-twenties: "A horrible time: shallow and trivial and silly. The remarkable thing is that anybody survived in such an atmosphere--in a place where they could call F. Scott Fitzgerald a great writer!"

INTERVIEWER: You don't agree?

PORTER: Of course I don't agree. I couldn't read him then, and I can't read him now.

Mary McCarthy is brutal about Simone de Beauvoir, calling her "pathetic" and "odious"; Susan Sontag who was, early in her career, compared to Mccarthy says she has no desire to write like Mary McCarthy, "a writer who has never mattered to me." Nary McCarthy admires Tolstoy, but Rebecca West considers Tolstoy overrated. Alexander Woollcott says of Dorothy Parker's work that it's a "potent distillation of nectar and wormwood, of ambrosia and deadly nightshade", but Dorothy Parker is mainly charitable towards the writers of the twenties and thirties and says that they might have seemed like flops, but they weren't. "Fitzgerald, the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time."

Two very different writers--Anne Sexton and Nadine Gordimer--both quote Kafka, and not only do they quote Kafka, they quote the same words from Kafka: "A book ought to be an axe, to break up the frozen sea within us~" And Katharine Anne Porter gives us a brief but fine lecture on the pleasure (and esthetic necessity) of using simple words, while Joyce Carol Oates speaks bracingly about the writer's life: One must be pitiless about this matter of "mood". In a sense, the writing will create the mood. If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function--a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind--then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Generally, I have found this to be true; I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes...and somehow the act of writing changes everything." These consoling words about the writing process are just one of about four hundred reasons for buying this spirited collection of credos and opinions.

A Must-Read for All Women and/or Writers!
Most definitely needs more stars!

If you read (have read) or admire any of the sixteen writers profiled in this awesome book, then this little jewel will not disappoint you in the least.It's enlightening, inspiring, encouraging and instructive; a voyeuristic peek into the minds and writing habits of some of the best women writers of our generation.I loved what Anne Sexton told the interviewer when asked if she had any advice to young poets.She said, "Put your ear close down to your soul and listen hard."

The writers interviewed are:Dorothy Parker, Marianne Moore, Maya Angelou, Susan Sontag, Anne Sexton, Katherine Anne Porter, Simone de Beauvoir, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion, P.L. Travers, Eudora Welty, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bishop and Mary McCarthy.

This is a first-rate book.
This book of interviews with women writers, originally done for the Paris Review, is the finest book I have ever encountered on women writing or doing any committed creative work. There's really nothing like it outthere. It is a prize in itself. ... Read more

Product Description
Canadian Fiction Studies are an answer to every librarian's, student's, and teacher's wishes. Each book, about 80 pages in length, contains clear, readable information on a major Canadian novel. These studies are carefully designed readings of the novels; they are not substitutes for reading them. Each book is attractively produced and follows the same format, so students will know exactly what to expect:

A chronology of the author's life The importance of the book Critical reception Reading of the text Selected list of works cited ... Read more

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Partial Set of 20 gilt-stamped, maroon leatherette hardcovers, including:Credit and Collections, Transportation and Traffic Management, Accounting Principles, Business and the Man, Economics, Cost Control, Public RelationsOffice Administration, Personnel Management and Labor Relations, Purchasing and Storing, Production Control, Salesmanship,Financial and Business Statements, Plant Management, Business Letters and Communications, Commercial Law,Business Organization,Advertising,Sales Management,Banking ... Read more

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A history of the cluv, bound with elegant green boards, gold lettering and insignia front & spine. Reprints of past history. Photographs and other illustrations. Likely limited edition 1500. ... Read more

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The Canadian Poetry Contest was launched to provide funds to help Canada India Village Aid in its programme of building dams and digging wells to counter the serious drought conditions that have arisen in northwestern India. A total of 1,255 poets entered no less than 3,223 poems. This collection includes the six prize-winning poems by John Pass (first prize), J. Dalayne Barber, Ron Charach, Jan Conn, Kerry Johanssen and Dale (David) Zieroth plus 45 by such well-known poets as Dorothy Livesay, Anne Marriott, H.R. Percy and Susan Musgrave as well as a host of others, many published here for the first time. ... Read more

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"Facilitating Online Learning: Effective Strategies for Moderators" is Atwood Publishing's latest title and one of your greates resources for distance education. It will help you build an online community and fuel online dialogue to create relationships between interactants. It will also provide you with a wide repertoire of strategies for sharpening your course's content and ways to fend off and avoid technological problems and roadblocks that you will invariably face during your class. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A fantastic help for online course moderators.
This book was an amazing resource for me.After seeing what Collison, Haavind, Tinker, and Elbaum do with online moderation, I recognized dozens of great strategies to add to my facilitation arsenal.Highly recommend it!

Excellent
I wish it had been a text for one of my classes.Had to discover it later.Well...a worthwhile discovery.It doesn't get 5 stars only because I hardly ever give anything 5.Probably 4.75. ... Read more

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Chapters: Robertson Davies, Margaret Atwood, Marshall Mcluhan, Northrop Frye, Anne Carson, George Woodcock, Rinaldo Walcott, Hugh Maclennan, James Nicoll, George Elliott Clarke, Alberto Manguel, Linda Hutcheon, Cyril Dabydeen, Sky Gilbert, Darko Suvin, Patrick Lane, Guy Sylvestre, Leon Edel, Hugh Kenner, Penny Petrone, Stephen Vizinczey, Justin D. Edwards, E. J. Pratt, Donald Greene, Frank Davey, Malcolm Ross, Claude Bissell, Adele Reinhartz, Herménégilde Chiasson, Susan Wood, Roy Daniells, Peter Swirski, Pierre Nepveu, Hédi Bouraoui, W. H. New, Louis Dudek, Marc Shell, Ruth Aproberts, A. F. Moritz, David Staines, John Clute, Ken Adachi, Eugene Benson, Warren Tallman, Maurice Lebel, Lorne Pierce, Antanas Sileika, Kenneth G. T. Webster, Bill Glassco, Jeffery Donaldson, Arlene Perly Rae, Bruce Meyer, Michael Groden, A. J. M. Smith, Wayne Tefs, Camille Roy, Paul G. Socken, Warren Cariou, John Metcalf, Joan Thomas, Doris Giller, Geoff Pevere, John Sutherland, Ann Dooley, Andrew Donskov, Brian T. Fitch. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 254. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC (July 21, 1911 December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholara professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory. McLuhan is known for the expressions "the medium is the message" and "global village". McLuhan was a fixture in media discourse from the late 1960s to his death and he continues to be an influential and controversial figure. More than ten years after his death he was named the "patron saint" of Wired magazine. McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta, to Methodist parents Elsie Naomi (née Hall) and Herbert Ernest McLuhan. His brother,...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=19548 ... Read more

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Chapters: Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Milton Acorn, Margaret Avison, George Bowering, Leonard Cohen, Dionne Brand, George Elliott Clarke, Jan Zwicky, Anne Szumigalski, Alden Nowlan, Tim Lilburn, Al Purdy, F. R. Scott, Don Mckay, Gwendolyn Macewen, Ralph Gustafson, Suzanne Jacob, Patrick Lane, Fred Wah, Governor General's Award for English Language Poetry or Drama, Nicole Brossard, Herménégilde Chiasson, Robert Hilles, Erin Mouré, Pierre Nepveu, Anne Compton, D. G. Jones, Phyllis Webb, John Newlove, Governor General's Award for French Language Poetry, Lorna Crozier, Robert Dickson, Governor General's Award for French Language Poetry or Drama, Roy Miki, E. D. Blodgett, John Glassco, John Pass, Stephen Scobie, Pierre Desruisseaux, Paulette Jiles, Don Coles, Roo Borson, Heather Spears, David Donnell, Stephanie Bolster, Jacob Scheier. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 199. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Leonard Norman Cohen, CC, GOQ (heb. , born September 21, 1934) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, poet and novelist. Cohen published his first book of poetry in Montreal in 1956 and his first novel in 1963. His work often deals with the exploration of religion, isolation, sexuality and interpersonal relationships. Famously reclusive, having once spent several years in a Zen Buddhist monastery, and possessing a persona frequently associated with mystique, he is extremely well-regarded by critics for his literary accomplishments, for the richness of his lyrics, and for producing an output of work of high artistic quality over a five-decade career. Musically, Cohen's earliest songs (many of which appeared on the 1967 album, Songs of Leonard Cohen) were rooted in European folk music. In the 1970s, his material encompassed pop, cabaret and world music. Since the 1980s, his h...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=19965375 ... Read more