Ten Favorite Releases in the University Press of Mississippi’s Literary Conversations Series
(The University Press of Mississippi has made an invaluable contribution to the publishing landscape with their “Literary Conversations Series,” each volume of which presents a chronologically arranged, career-long series of interviews with a particular author. So far, there are 191 books in the series—and that’s not counting their separate series of conversations with comic artists, filmmakers, public intellectuals, and TV creators. I encourage you to take a look at their catalog. These are ten of my own favorites, arranged in order of preference. Inevitably, it’s authors who are meaningful to me personally who populate the list, but I’ve tried to order the volumes not by how much I happen to like their other work, but by how illuminating these particular books are, how forthcoming the writers were, and how many other collections of their interviews are easily available; Delany and Vonnegut, for instance, have been frequently interviewed, those interviews widely collected, so they’re near the bottom of my list.)
Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations
Conversations with William Maxwell
Conversations with Gabriel García Márquez
Conversations with Octavia Butler
Conversations with Ursula K. LeGuin
Conversations with David Foster Wallace
Conversations with Graham Greene
Conversations with Chaim Potok
Conversations with Samuel R. Delany
Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut
— July 14, 2021