Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘literary legends’

Essays |

Bishop and Lowell Read Everything

From the Archives: What does our reading have to do with our writing, exactly? Charlotte Boulay departs from traditional talk about fiction, reflects on her own reading list, and finds comfort and enthusiasm in reading Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell’s letters to each other, in which they discuss everything they read—and the fact that they read all the time.


Interviews |

Influences: An Interview with Tobias Wolff

From the Archives: Travis Holland talks with fiction master Tobias Wolff about the pleasures and anxieties of influence, the changing societal role of writer-celebrities, and the reasons Wolff has “always been attracted to the incisiveness, velocity, exactitude, precision of the short story.”


Interviews |

Finding the Authenticating Narrator: Part II of a Conversation with Russell Banks

Back in the fall of 2012, Sebastian Matthews hosted Russell Banks as Visiting Writer for Warren Wilson College’s Harwood-Cole Lecture Series. Knowing he’d be in town for a few days, Matthews arranged to interview Banks, who is a long-time family friend, on Jeff Davis’ radio show Word Play. What follows is Part II of their conversation.


Interviews |

Finding the Authenticating Narrator: Part I of a Conversation with Russell Banks

Back in the fall of 2012, Sebastian Matthews hosted Russell Banks as Visiting Writer for Warren Wilson College’s Harwood-Cole Lecture Series. Knowing he’d be in town for a few days, Matthews arranged to interview Banks, who is a long-time family friend, on Jeff Davis’ radio show Word Play. What follows is Part I of their conversation.


Reviews |

The Pure Gold Baby, by Margaret Drabble

“The real estate in North London Drabble-land has appreciated and her cast of bohemian academics has aged over the fifty years since her first novel, A Summer Bird Cage (1963),” Ellen Prentiss Campbell reports, reviewing Dame Margaret Drabble’s newest novel, The Pure Gold Baby, “but she’s back, in fine form.”