BOOK BRIEF: "Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews"

The Paris Review Interviews is a perfect start for learning about or deepening your understanding of (1) the history of twentieth and twenty-first century literature, (2) the most enriching books to read, (3) biographies of master writers, (4) varied approaches to the writing process, and (5) insights into the human condition. This four-volume collection, each featuring 16 interviews, will cover a full summer of beach reading and never fail to entertain, educate, and inspire. Here is the all-star, eclectic list of 64 critics, essayists, novelists, playwrights, poets, and screenwriters included in the series:

• Volume 1 (2006): Dorothy Parker (1956). Truman Capote (1957), Ernest Hemingway (1958), T. S. Eliot (1959), Saul Bellow (1966), Jorge Luis Borges (1967), Kurt Vonnegut (1977), James M. Cain (1978), Rebecca West (1981), Elizabeth Bishop (1981), Robert Stone (1984), Robert Gottlieb (1994), Richard Price (1996), Billy Wilder (1996), Jack Gilbert (2005), and Joan Didion (2006).
• Volume 2 (2007): Graham Greene (1953), James Thurber (1955), William Faulkner (1956), Robert Lowell (1961), Isaac Bashevis Singer (1968), Eudora Welty (172), John Gardner (1979), Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1981), Philip larking (1982), James Baldwin (1984), William Gaddis (1987), Harold Bloom (1991), Tony Morrison (1993), Alice Munro (1994), Peter Carey (2006), and Stephen King (2006).
• Volume 3 (2008): Ralph Ellison (1955) George Simenon (1955), Isak Dinesen (1956), Evelyn Waugh (1963), William Carlos Williams (1964), Harold Pinter (1966), John Cheever (1976), Joyce Carol Oates (1978), Jean Rhys (1979), Raymond Carver (1983), Chinua Achebe (1984), Ted Hughes (1995), Jan Morris (1997), Martin Amis (1998), Salman Rushdie (2005), and Norman Mailer (2007).
• Volume 4 (2009): William Styron (1954), Marianne Moore (1960), Ezra Pound (1962), Jack Kerouac (1968), E. B. White (1969),  P. G. Wodehouse (1975), John Ashbery (1983), Philip Roth (1984), Maya Angelou (1990), Stephen Sondheim (1997), V. S. Naipaul (1998), Paul Auster (2003), Haruki Murakami (2004), Orhan Pamuk (2005), David Grossman (2007), and Marilynne Robinson (2008). 

You can sample these interviews and many more--a total of 427 since 1953 as of this post--at the legendary Paris Review website.