with thanks to Nick Stang!

The Paris Review: interviews now online.

Obrienaternal highlights:
J. G. Ballard, The Art of Fiction No. 85 Interviewed by Thomas Frick
Doris Lessing, The Art of Fiction No. 102 Interviewed by Thomas Frick
Stephen King, The Art of Fiction No. 189 Interviewed by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and Nathaniel Rich
Umberto Eco, The Art of Fiction No. 197 Interviewed by Lila Azam Zanganeh
Ray Bradbury, The Art of Fiction No. 203 Interviewed by Sam Weller

For quite other reasons: Yves Bonnefoy—Robert Fagles—Robert Fitzgerald—Seamus Heaney—Kazuo Ishiguro—Tahar ben Jelloun—Paul Muldoon—Haruki Murakami—Jeanette Winterson

I still gripe, though. Plenty missing who jolly well ought to be there, or to have been there. Writers can’t all be upper-class white north-east-American males and classy Brits in the same rumpled bearded old boys’ club, can they? There are more, y’know, foreign writers out there. Exacerbation of my grumpiness about distinctions between poetry and translation. Females of the species? Octavia E. Butler? Ursula K. Le Guin? Any number of writers of SF and other speculative fictions? It’s not as if there aren’t any good ones… but that sort of thing remains “genre” and marginal, precisely as marginalised by the likes of the PR. And the canon remains canonical, in a similar vicious closed circle. Rare exceptions, whence selections above.

Still, it’s a start. Interesting stuff on how writers write (and fodder for others’ writings on autofictions, doubtless), and at least the stuff has escaped the overstuffed armchairs is out there in the free open virtual wild. Here’s what it looks like–new! improved!! click on screenshot-image to open real live page in a new tab!!!–: