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The Paris Review has introduced the important writers of the day. Adrienne Rich was first published in its pages, as were Philip Roth, V. S.
Naipaul, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Mona Simpson, Edward P. Jones, and Rick
Moody. In addition to the focus on original creative work, The Paris Review's
Writers at Work interview series offers authors a rare opportunity to
discuss their life and art at length.
Synopses & Reviews
Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg; On the Road, Naked Lunch, Howl: The names and titles continue to reverberate as the Beats remain a vital source of inspiration to successive generations of readers and writers. In their Writers at Work series, The Paris Review has interviewed all the key Beats and their cousins, the Black Mountain School of experimental poets. In this new collection, they describe their art and lives, creating a unique and fascinating record of the writers and their inspirations.
Allen Ginsberg interviews Andrei Voznesensky and Amiri Baraka and is interviewed himself, alongside Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Robert Creely, Ken Kesey, and Denise Levertov. Beat Writers at Work also includes a previously unpublished interview with Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
Rick Moody, the author of Garden State, The Ice Storm, and Purple America has written a new Introduction.
Synopsis
From the pages of The Paris Review, a collection of interviews with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and more
Edited by Paris Review co-founder George Plimpton, and with an introduction by Rick Moody, this anthology of Writers at Work interviews featuring the great figures of the Beat and Black Mountain movements is an in-depth look into one of the most famous literary tribes of the century. The Beats, with their mix of talent, bravado, and insight into the social and political climes of their time, continue to influence students, writers, and critics today.
Mr. Plimpton and his able cohorts at The Paris Review have cannily chosen this historical moment for the retrieval of this archive, viz., the fortieth anniversary of Kerouac s masterpiece, and also the recent departures of Ginsberg and Burroughs to celestial addresses, and thus we have a real warts-and-all retrospective, ex post facto, Kerouac in the late sixties, Ginsberg (in one of two pieces here) in the late seventies, Bowles in the eighties, Snyder in the nineties, so that the high period of Beat style is well past at the time of these conversations; Plimpton s wisdom here amounts to permitting the language and form of these interviews to persist over the years and thereby accrue historical context, in which we are enabled to see how the Beat praxis (or Black Mountain praxis) is reactive when faced with such forces as Vietnam, hippie culture, eighties consumerism, neglect by literary history, and so forth. from the introduction by Rick Moody"