Since 1953, when the first issue of the magazine
Paris Review appeared with an interview of E. M. Forster, our Q&A encounters with the great writers of our times have come to be recognized as a sort of literary genre unto themselves: the
Paris Review interview. More than fifty years –and more than three hundred interviews– later, the archive continues to grow with each new issue of the magazine. In November 2006, the first volume of a four-book set of
The Paris Review Interviews was celebrated by reviewers across the English-speaking world.
The Paris Review has introduced the important writers of the day. Adrienne Rich was first published in its pages, as were Philip Roth, V. S. Naipaul, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Mona Simpson, Edward P. Jones, and Rick Moody. In addition to the focus on original creative work, The Paris Review's «Writers at Work» interview series offers authors a rare opportunity to discuss their life and art at length.
From William Faulkner's famous reply, "The writer's only responsibility is to his art," to James Salter's confession — "What is the ultimate impulse to write? Because all this is going to vanish" — The Paris Review has elicited many of the most arresting, illuminating, and revealing discussions of life and craft from the greatest writers of our age. Under its original editor, George Plimpton, The Paris Review is credited with inventing the modern literary interview, and more than half a century later the magazine remains the master of the form. By turns intimate, instructive, gossipy, curmudgeonly, elegant, hilarious, cunning, and consoling, The Paris Review interviews have come to be celebrated as classic literary works in their own right.
In the Topos first one-volume selection of interviews (Art of Fiction) ten names, ten famous authors are included with an introduction by Orhan Pamuk.