How to Read a Novelist by John Freeman"John Freeman, author and editor of Granta magazine, has interviewed nearly every name in fiction and the literary world. In this collection Freeman has compiled the most insightful and fascinating of his interviews, essays and articles.
In How to Read a Novelist we encounter Paul Theroux on the state of sex in America, Margaret Atwood as inventor, John Updike as relationship advisor and Geoff Dyer as England’s hippest middle-aged novelist, among many others including Jonathan Safran Foe, Philip Roth, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, David Foster Wallace, A. S. Byatt and Peter Carey."
Genres: Nonfiction
The book contains short interviews with contemporary authors and I will probably come back to it before I start something written by any of these authors (i.e. John Irving,, Haruki Murakami, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Roth, John Updike, Ian McEwan, Orhan Pamuk and many many others).
“True storytellers write, I believe, not because they can but because they have to. There is something they want to say about the world that can only be said in a story.”
“The only thing an interviewer can do to capture what a novelist truly does is to make them talk and tell stories, and think aloud.”
