A collection of interviews with the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature that serves as an invaluable companion to her work. Doris Lessing is one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These interviews give us her thoughts on her early years as a communist and fledgling writer in Southern Rhodesia, her views on marriage, the family and feminism, on other writers from Tolstoy to Lawrence, and on her later experiments in psychotherapy and mysticism. She reveals how these preoccupations have influenced her own work, from 'The Golden Notebook' to her acclaimed autobiographical masterpiece 'Under My Skin'. The book is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand not just Lessing, but also the profound impact she has had on our age.

Filming Forster focuses upon the challenges of producing film adaptations of five of E. M. Forster's novels. Rather than follow the older comparative approach, which typically damned the film for not being "faithful" to the novel, this project explores the interactive relationship between film and novel. That relationship is implicit in the title "Filming" Forster, rather than "Forster Filmed," which would suggest a completed process. A film adaptation forever changes the novel from which it was adapted, just as a return to the novel changes the viewer's perceptions of the film. Adapting Forster's novels for the screen was postponed until well after the author's death in 1970 because the trustees of the author's estate fulfilled his wish that his work not be filmed. Following the appearance of David Lean's film A Passage to India in 1984, four other film adaptations were released within seven years. Perhaps the most important was the Merchant Ivory production of Maurice, based upon Forster's "gay" novel, published a year after his death. That film was among the first to approach same-sex relationships between men in a serious, respectful, and generally optimistic manner.

In the foreword to Li-Young Lee's first book, "Rose" (BOA Editions, 1986), Gerald Stern wrote, "What characterizes Li-Young Lee's poetry is a certain kind of humility, a kind of cunning, a love of plain speech, a search for wisdom and understanding. . . . I think we are in the presence of a true spirit." Poetry lovers agree "Rose" has gone on to sell more than eighty thousand copies, and Li-Young Lee has become one of the country's most beloved poets.

"Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee" is a collection of the best dozen interviews given by Li-Young Lee over the past twenty years. From a twenty-nine-year-old poet prodigy to a seasoned veteran in high demand for readings and appearances across the United States and abroad, these interviews capture Li-Young Lee at various stages of his artistic development. He not only discusses his family's flight from political oppression in China and Indonesia, but how that journey affected his poetry and the engaging, often painful, insights being raised a cultural outsider in America afforded him. Other topics include spirituality (primarily Christianity and Buddhism) and a wide range of aesthetic topics such as literary influences, his own writing practices, the role of formal and informal education in becoming a writer, and his current life as a famous and highly sought-after American poet.

Conversations with Colum McCann brings together eighteen interviews with a world-renowned fiction writer. Ranging from his 1994 literary debut, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, to a previously unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews represent the development as well as the continuation of McCann's interests. The number and length of the later conversations attest to his star-power. Let the Great World Spin earned him the National Book Award and promises to become a major motion picture. His most recent novel, TransAtlantic, has awed readers with its dynamic yoking of the 1845-46 visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland, the 1919 first nonstop transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown, and Senator George Mitchell's 1998 efforts to achieve a peace accord in Northern Ireland. An extensive interview by scholar Cecile Maudet is included here, as is an interview by John Cusatis, who wrote Understanding Colum McCann, the first extensive critical analysis of McCann's work. An author who actually enjoys talking about his work, McCann (b. 1965) offers insights into his method of writing, what he hopes to achieve, as well as the challenge of writing each novel to go beyond his accomplishments in the novel before. Readers will note how many of his responses include stories in which he himself is the object of the humor and how often his remarks reveal insights into his character as a man who sees the grittiness of the urban landscape but never loses faith in the strength of ordinary people and their capacity to prevail.

With increasing candor and openness May Sarton's conversations have given an intimate view of her honest, courageous inner life. Best known to her many readers as a novelist and keeper of journals, Sarton sees herself pre-eminently as a poet. In the interviews collected here she speaks forthrightly about herself, her independence, and her writing.

Although born in Belgium, Sarton is quintessentially American in her choice of solitude on which her personal well-being and writing depend. She is a modernist who has defined herself as an artist, with the occasionally painful recognition that all else must finally be subordinated to her writing. Her journal "After the Stroke" makes clear that when she cannot write she stands on the edge of the abyss of nonbeing.

These interviews offer Sarton's readers the model of a woman who has supported herself as a writer of achievement, who has made her way without the comforts of academic tenure, grants, or bestseller listings.

John Banville (b. 1945) is a distinguished novelist and winner of several prestigious awards, including the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sea. As a teenager Banville hoped to be a painter, and although he ultimately decided he lacked the talent for it, his passion for painting continues to influence and inform his work. Banville conceives the novel as a work of art aimed not at the present, but for the ages. He aspires to create narratives that offer readers a sense of what it is to be conscious, human, and feeling, and aims to convey his conviction that "the familiar is always unfamiliar, the ordinary extraordinary."Conversations with John Banville is the first interview collection with this esteemed writer and includes eighteen interviews that reflect on nearly five decades of work, from his first book, Long Lankin, to his novel Mrs. Osmond and memoir, Time Pieces. The collection also includes discussions about - and with, in the case of James Gleick's 2014 interview - Banville's alter ego, Benjamin Black, who writes crime novels. Highly engaging and insightful, Banville's interviews offer a variety of writerly autobiography regarding what he has aimed to do in his work and how he continues to pursue perfection, which he has known from the beginning must be impossible.

Conversations with Colum McCann brings together eighteen interviews with a world-renowned fiction writer. Ranging from his 1994 literary debut, Fishing the Sloe-Black River, to a new and unpublished interview conducted in 2016, these interviews represent the development as well as the continuation of McCann's interests. The number and length of the later conversations attest to his star-power. Let the Great World Spin earned him the National Book Award and promises to become a major motion picture. His most recent novel, TransAtlantic, has awed readers with its dynamic yoking of the 1845-46 visit of Frederick Douglass to Ireland, the 1919 first nonstop transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown, and Senator George Mitchell's 1998 efforts to achieve a peace accord inNorthern Ireland. An extensive interview by scholar Cecile Maudet is included here, as is an interview by John Cusatis, who wrote Understanding Colum McCann, the first extensive critical analysisof McCann's work. An author who actually enjoys talking about his work, McCann (b. 1965) offers insights into his method of writing, what he hopes to achieve, as well the challenge of writing each novel to go beyond his accomplishments in the novel before. Readers will note how many of his responses include stories in which hehimself is the object of the humor and how often his remarks reveal insights into his character as a man who sees the grittiness of the urban landscape but never loses faith in the strength of ordinary people and their capacity to prevail.

John Banville (b. 1945) is a distinguished novelist and winner of several prestigious awards, including the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Sea. As a teenager Banville hoped to be a painter, and although he ultimately decided he lacked the talent for it, his passion for painting continues to influence and inform his work. Banville conceives the novel as a work of art aimed not at the present, but for the ages. He aspires to create narratives that offer readers a sense of what it is to be conscious, human, and feeling, and aims to convey his conviction that "the familiar is always unfamiliar, the ordinary extraordinary."Conversations with John Banville is the first interview collection with this esteemed writer and includes eighteen interviews that reflect on nearly five decades of work, from his first book, Long Lankin, to his novel Mrs. Osmond and memoir, Time Pieces. The collection also includes discussions about - and with, in the case of James Gleick's 2014 interview - Banville's alter ego, Benjamin Black, who writes crime novels. Highly engaging and insightful, Banville's interviews offer a variety of writerly autobiography regarding what he has aimed to do in his work and how he continues to pursue perfection, which he has known from the beginning must be impossible.

As the subtitle indicates, this book has three majors concerns. The first and most important concern is an examination of the film adaptations of Woolf's novels-To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and Mrs. Dalloway-in the order the films were released. This is the heart of the matter, a fairly conventional effort to acknowledge film reviews as well as the criticism of academicians in film or literature as a starting point for a fresh view of these three film adaptations. Since many film specialists prefer that no film ever be adapted from literary fiction and many literature specialists have similarly wished that their favorite novels had never been filmed, the effort to mediate the two sides can be challenging. Of the three films, To the Lighthouse is the least successful, tending toward the old Masterpiece Theater mode of attempting to be faithful to the "source text," to use the term of the film theorist Robert Stam, but missing the essence of the novel. Director Sally Potter's Orlando is cinematically the most venturesome and attractive, although some Woolf readers condemn Potter's erasure of Woolf's intent to celebrate her affair with Vita Sackville-West (whose son Nigel Nicolson called Woolf's Orlando "the longest and most charming love-letter in literature"). Mrs. Dalloway tends toward the Merchant/Ivory style of treating literary masterworks-indeed, the film credits include a debt of gratitude to the producer/director partnership-and is generally carried by the star power of Vanessa Redgrave, although it is difficult to imagine her having a crush on another young woman, even at eighteen. The book's second concern is Woolf's interest in what she would call "the cinema." As a member of Bloomsbury, she saw and participated in the discussion of the cinema, especially avant-garde films, which she considered to be more the future of cinema than film adaptations, upon which she heaped great scorn for their ravenous, if not rapacious, consumption of vulnerable literary fiction such as Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Woolf specialists such as Leslie Hankins proclaim her one of the earliest and most significant British film theorists for the brilliant essay "The Cinema" (1925), as film was just beginning to establish itself as art and not merely popular entertainment. The third concern is a complex effort to explore the David Hare/Stephen Daldry film adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours, an homage to Mrs. Dalloway in which Virginia Woolf has a starring role, as portrayed by Oscar winner Nicole Kidman. The film and Kidman's prosthetic nose produced a violent division among the Woolfians who either commended its bringing legions of new readers to Mrs. Dalloway and potentially to "Woolf"-Mrs. Dalloway becoming the best-seller it could not have been in her lifetime-or were outraged by the film's diminishment of probably the most important female British novelist of the 20th century. Even Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing spoke out against the travesty of a novelist she considered a foremother of later 20th-century writers.

As the subtitle indicates, this book has three majors concerns. The first and most important concern is an examination of the film adaptations of Woolf's novels-To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and Mrs. Dalloway-in the order the films were released. This is the heart of the matter, a fairly conventional effort to acknowledge film reviews as well as the criticism of academicians in film or literature as a starting point for a fresh view of these three film adaptations. Since many film specialists prefer that no film ever be adapted from literary fiction and many literature specialists have similarly wished that their favorite novels had never been filmed, the effort to mediate the two sides can be challenging. Of the three films, To the Lighthouse is the least successful, tending toward the old Masterpiece Theater mode of attempting to be faithful to the "source text," to use the term of the film theorist Robert Stam, but missing the essence of the novel. Director Sally Potter's Orlando is cinematically the most venturesome and attractive, although some Woolf readers condemn Potter's erasure of Woolf's intent to celebrate her affair with Vita Sackville-West (whose son Nigel Nicolson called Woolf's Orlando "the longest and most charming love-letter in literature"). Mrs. Dalloway tends toward the Merchant/Ivory style of treating literary masterworks-indeed, the film credits include a debt of gratitude to the producer/director partnership-and is generally carried by the star power of Vanessa Redgrave, although it is difficult to imagine her having a crush on another young woman, even at eighteen. The book's second concern is Woolf's interest in what she would call "the cinema." As a member of Bloomsbury, she saw and participated in the discussion of the cinema, especially avant-garde films, which she considered to be more the future of cinema than film adaptations, upon which she heaped great scorn for their ravenous, if not rapacious, consumption of vulnerable literary fiction such as Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Woolf specialists such as Leslie Hankins proclaim her one of the earliest and most significant British film theorists for the brilliant essay "The Cinema" (1925), as film was just beginning to establish itself as art and not merely popular entertainment. The third concern is a complex effort to explore the David Hare/Stephen Daldry film adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours, an homage to Mrs. Dalloway in which Virginia Woolf has a starring role, as portrayed by Oscar winner Nicole Kidman. The film and Kidman's prosthetic nose produced a violent division among the Woolfians who either commended its bringing legions of new readers to Mrs. Dalloway and potentially to "Woolf"-Mrs. Dalloway becoming the best-seller it could not have been in her lifetime-or were outraged by the film's diminishment of probably the most important female British novelist of the 20th century. Even Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing spoke out against the travesty of a novelist she considered a foremother of later 20th-century writers.

Filming Forster focuses upon the challenges of producing film adaptations of five of E. M. Forster's novels. Rather than follow the older comparative approach, which typically damned the film for not being "faithful" to the novel, this project explores the interactive relationship between film and novel. That relationship is implicit in the title "Filming" Forster, rather than "Forster Filmed," which would suggest a completed process. A film adaptation forever changes the novel from which it was adapted, just as a return to the novel changes the viewer's perceptions of the film. Adapting Forster's novels for the screen was postponed until well after the author's death in 1970 because the trustees of the author's estate fulfilled his wish that his work not be filmed. Following the appearance of David Lean's film A Passage to India in 1984, four other film adaptations were released within seven years. Perhaps the most important was the Merchant Ivory production of Maurice, based upon Forster's "gay" novel, published a year after his death. That film was among the first to approach same-sex relationships between men in a serious, respectful, and generally optimistic manner.

Although he did not start publishing until middle age, Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) had over sixty published books to his credit by the time of his death. One of them, the short novel A Clockwork Orange (1962), was to bring him fame and notoriety outside England following the 1971 release of Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation. The prominence of that single novel would impel its author to confront a public continually asking directly or by implication: What else have you written, Mr. Burgess? Burgess produced scores of novels, biographies, books of literary criticism, film scripts, and news articles. A linguist and polyglot who was fluent in eight languages, he invented the language used in the 1981 film Quest for Fire. He translated and adapted Bizet's Carmen, Weber's Oberon, and other operas for the English stage. His ReJoyce: An Introduction to James Joyce for the Ordinary Reader remains a standard in Joycean criticism. Conversations with Anthony Burgess captures, through in-depth interviews, a writer of tremendous energy, inventiveness, and self-discipline. The collection brings together interviews from 1971 to 1989, including two pieces published for the first time. Earl G. Ingersoll is distinguished professor emeritus of English at SUNY College at Brockport. He has written, edited, and coedited many books, including Conversations with May Sarton and Conversations with Rita Dove, both from University Press of Mississippi. Mary C. Ingersoll is a retired elementary school teacher who specialized in teaching humanities to gifted students.

Biography -- Literary Criticism-->

In 1993, Rita Dove (b. 1952) became the nation's youngest and first female African American Poet Laureate. This collection of interviews offers a fascinating portrait of her.

Having published over a half-dozen collections of poetry, Dove won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for "Thomas and Beulah," In addition, she has published a novel, "Through the Ivory Gate," and her play, "The Darker Face of Earth," has been produced on several stages.

Unlike many other writers, Rita Dove has no objection to being interviewed, in part because she enjoys reading interviews. Toni Morrison's, for instance, gave Dove her inspiration as a beginning writer.

In these conversations that range over a decade and a half, she reveals an extraordinary dedication to preserving the integrity of her art, particularly as others intrude upon her to crusade on behalf of racial and gender issues.

Although she regards herself as a feminist and expresses pride in her African American heritage, she leaves crusading outside the door as she enters the writer's workroom. Once inside, she focuses on making each poem stand up to her own exceptionally rigorous standards.

In these conversations the reader meets also the Rita Dove who lives outside the poet's workroom. In addition to writing, she plays the viola de gamba, is addicted to crossword puzzles, and has taken lessons in singing and in ballroom dancing. In response to "What kind of questions are you not asked in interviews that you would like to answer?" she bravely and surprisingly replies, "Personal questions."

Earl G. Ingersoll is distinguished teaching professor of English emeritus at SUNY College at Brockport.His previous books include "Conversations with May Sarton" (University Press of Mississippi), "The Post-Confessionals: Conversations with American Poets of the Eighties" (with Judith Kitchen and Stan Sanvel Rubin), and "Doris Lessing: Conversations," among others.