University Press of Mississippi

"Fiction/facts are what the artist creates. Good writing is always about things that are important to you, things that are scary to you, things that eat you up. But the writing is a way of not...

Although best known for his novels The Collector, The Magus, and The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles is also a short story writer, a poet, a respected translator, and a prolific essayist. In...

John le Carr? (b. 1931) is the pen name of David Cornwell. Under that pseudonym he has become the leading writer of contemporary spy thrillers. Tremendously popular and deeply influential, his novels...

Biography -- Literary CriticismJoseph Brodsky (1940-1996) is unquestionably the greatest poet to emerge from postwar Russia and one of the great minds of the last century.After his expulsion from the...

Spanning three decades of his literary career, from Catch-22 to comments on the Persian Gulf War, Conversations with Joseph Heller contains a selection of the most significant, informative, and...

Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard (b. 1968) made a literary mark on his home country in 1998, when his debut novel won the prestigious Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature. His fame continued to...

Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard (b. 1968) made a literary mark on his home country in 1998, when his debut novel won the prestigious Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature. His fame continued to...

Conversations with Kazuo Ishiguro collects nineteen interviews, conducted over the past two decades on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, with the author of Booker Prize-winning The Remains of...

Ken Kesey (1935-2001) is the author of several works of well-known fiction and other hard-to-classify material. His debut novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was a critical and commercial...

Ken Kesey (1935-2001) is the author of several works of well-known fiction and other hard-to-classify material. His debut novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, was a critical and commercial...

Soon after Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) published his first novel, Lucky Jim, in 1954, he became an object of literary and journalistic scrutiny. This attention would continue until his last days, four...

How does a girl from Grundy, Virginia, become a successful writer? The interviews and profiles in Conversations with Lee Smith tell the story of one woman's discovery of her coal-mining hometown as a...

A fundamental collection of sixteen interviews with the esteemed writer and former president of the Haiku Society of AmericaAuthor: John ZhengPublisher: University Press of MississippiPublication...

Leon Forrest (1937-1997) was among the most innovative and ambitious African American fiction writers of the twentieth century. His books-which include novels There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden,...

Margaret Walker (1915-1998) began her writing career as a poet in the late 1930s. But she was cast into the limelight in 1966 when her novel Jubilee was published to wide critical and commercial...

In Conversations with Mary Gordon, the author reveals her intellectual vigor, her freewheeling humor, and her strongly held opinions on issues ranging from sex to contemporary literature and gender...

For over half a century Mary McCarthy (1912-1989) was at the center of intellectual life in America. Both through her writing--she published twenty-four books and countless reviews and essays--and...

n 1976 Maxine Hong Kingston burst into American literature with the publication of The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. Since then her subsequent works--China Men (1980) and...

Since the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, launched him to fame, Michael Chabon (b. 1963) has become one of contemporary literature's most acclaimed novelists by pursuing...

Conversations with Michael Crichton brings together decades of interviews and profiles with one of the world's most successful authors. Michael Crichton (1942-2008) had many careers--doctor,...

Over forty years of interviews revealing the many contributions of this central personality in the evolution of the American countercultureAuthor: David Stephen CalonnePublisher: University Press of...

United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey (b. 1966) describes her mode as elegiac. Although the loss of her murdered mother informs each book, Trethewey's range of forms and subjects is wide. In...

Octavia Butler (1947-2006) spent the majority of her prolific career as the only major black female author of science fiction. Winner of both the Nebula and Hugo Awards as well as a MacArthur...

Thirty interviews with the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist best known for My Name is Red, Snow, and The Museum of InnocenceAuthor: Erdag G?nar, Pelin KivrakPublisher: University Press of...

Paul Auster (b. 1947) is one of the most critically acclaimed and intensely studied authors in America today. His varied career as a novelist, poet, translator, and filmmaker has attracted scholarly...

Paule Marshall (b. 1929) is a major contributor to the canons of African American and Caribbean American literature. In 1959, she published her first novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones, and was quickly...

For the first eighteen years of his career, Percival Everett (b. 1956) managed to fly under the radar of the literary establishment. He followed his artistic vision down a variety of unconventional...

Biography -- Literary CriticismIn 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...

In 1972 Rudolfo Anaya (1937-2020) made a quiet entry into American literature with the publication of Bless Me, Ultima. Over the span of twenty-two years, by word of mouth alone, this first novel...

If Russell Banks (b. 1940) says he doesn't "think about [his] reader at all when [he's] writing," he clearly enjoys talking with his actual readers, whether they be students, writers, or academics,...