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"What is it about interviews that attracts us?" Margaret Atwood asks in her introduction to this collection of 16 interviews from The Paris Review. "Specifically, what is it about interviews with writers?" Women Writers at Work may not answer that question, but it raises many, many more--and allows the writers included in this volume to speak for themselves. For decades the Paris Review has been interviewing authors of both genders and every literary stripe, and many of these interviews have been collected together in volumes like this one. This, however, is the first time the Writers at Work series has dedicated itself to one gender only. In this volume readers will find insightful interviews with Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, Dorothy Parker, P.L. Travers, Simone de Beauvoir, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, Nadine Gordimer, Maya Angelou, Anne Sexton, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates.

The Paris Review is famous for getting authors to open up. The subjects here offer honest, often provocative opinions about themselves (Dorothy Parker on her humorous verses: "I read my verses now and I ain't funny. I haven't been funny for twenty years"); each other (Mary McCarthy on "women writers": "Katherine Anne Porter? Don't think she really is--I mean her writing is certainly very feminine, but I would say that there wasn't the 'WW' business in Katherine Anne Porter"); and writing itself (Toni Morrison: "What makes me feel I belong here, out in this world, is not the teacher, not the mother, not the lover but what goes on in my mind when I'm writing"). The end result is a fascinating glimpse into these writers' minds and works. --Margaret Prior