Interviews in Print

Four collections of thought-provoking, engaging and stimulating interviews with some of the world's great writers by the acknowledged master of the literary interview, Eleanor Wachtel.



RANDOM ILLUMINATIONS:
CONVERSATIONS WITH CAROL SHIELDS
Goose Lane Editions
ISBN-13: 978-0-86492-501-5
ISBN-10: 0-86492-501-8

A great conversation can offer insight into the hearts and minds of its participants. In this intimate, wide-ranging collection of conversations (and some correspondence), writer-broadcaster Eleanor Wachtel and her friend, author Carol Shields, touch on both the personal and the professional.
Eleanor Wachtel first met Carol Shields in 1980; her first interview with Carol occurred in 1987, following the publication of Swann: A Mystery. They soon became friends, embarking on a dialogue that would last for almost two decades. In this illuminating book, Eleanor Wachtel brings together her rich collection of interviews with Carol from that first occasion to Shields's death in 2003. Disarmingly direct, Carol Shields talks about her writing, language and consciousness, and her interest in "redeeming the lives of lost or vanished women," all the while touching on topics as diverse as feminism, raising children, the metaphorical search for a home, and the joys and griefs of everyday life.

"This book isn't presented as a biography, but it seems to me to do just what the most discerning biography should do; that is, to give us a clear and lively and responsible and, yes, illuminating revelation of a writer's life and thought." - Alice Munro

Carol Shields is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Stone Diaries. She also won the Governor General's Award for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction, the Orange Prize, and numerous other awards. She was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize.




ORIGINAL MINDS
Harpercollins Canada
ISBN 0-00-200647-2

"Writers & Company" has set the gold standard for intelligent, insightful, riveting interviews. To mark the dawn of the new millennium, Eleanor Wachtel talked to some of the most inspiring and influential thinkers of our time -- people who have forever changed their area of specialty and influenced the world around them. As she writes in her introduction, "I wanted to interview people who had shaped the last century and whose influence would continue into the next... I hoped to have wide-ranging conversations with some of the most inspiring men and women of our time, people who've made a difference."

And what an outstanding list of people she met:

Jonathan Miller -- internationally acclaimed theatre and opera director, writer, member of Beyond the Fringe comedy troupe
Jane Goodall -- primatologist and scientist best known for her work with chimpanzees
Bernardo Bertolucci -- director whose films including the Oscar-winning The Last Emperor and Last Tango in Paris
George Steiner -- teacher, literary critic and theorist
Desmond Tutu -- former Archbishop of South Africa and co-chair of the Truth and "Reconciliation Commission"
Susan Sontag -- writer of novels, essays, works of non-fiction, and plays. In America won the National Book Award in 2000.
Amartya Sen -- Nobel Prize winner in Economics (1998)
Gloria Steinem -- feminist and activist, author whose 1983 collection of essays is titled Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
Jared Diamond -- teacher, Pulitzer Prize winner for Guns, Germs and Steel
Oliver Sacks -- neurologist, best known for his books Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Jane Jacobs -- internationally respected commentator on city design and planning
Umberto Eco -- "the Pavarotti of Semiotics" and writer of the international bestseller The Name of the Rose
Mary Douglas -- anthropologist, author of the classic Purity and Danger (1966)
Noam Chomsky -- world-famous linguist and dissident intellectual
Arthur C. Clarke -- writer, best known for his science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey
Harold Bloom -- "one of the world's most influential critic-scholar-theorists" according to the New York Times

A book for Eleanor Wachtel's many devotees and for anyone who has a curiosity about the fascinating intersection of people and ideas, Original Minds is a captivating read.




MORE WRITERS & COMPANY
Knopf Canada
ISBN: 0-394-28169-1

Eleanor Wachtel's entertaining, illuminating conversations with some of today's greatest literary lights, from CBC Radio's award-winning program, "Writers & Company".

"Eleanor Wachtel is a wonderful interviewer. . .by turns poignant and funny, thought-provoking and inspiring." Montreal Gazette

In this marvellous companion to the acclaimed first volume of Writers & Company, 22 writers -- novelists, essayists, writers of short stories -- explore what moves and motivates them. Kazuo Ishiguro tells how he changed as a novelist between writing The Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled. Carol Shields discusses biography as a tool of the fiction writer and reveals her faith in enduring love. Yale critic Harold Bloom movingly recounts his thirst for English literature, even as a child of six. Oliver Sacks talks about the connection between science and the empathy he feels for people who are isolated by conditions like autism. Chilean-born Isabel Allende talks about life in America, her belief in ghosts and her love of the erotic.

Praise for Writers & Company:

"Fast moving and often riveting." The Globe and Mail

"Fascinating..inspired." Winnipeg Free Press

"Cultural journalism at its best. " Ottawa Citizen

"Wonderfully useful, gloriously interesting...insightful, revealing, tantalizing." Victoria Times-Colonist

"A moveable feast." Calgary Herald

"Substantial, moving...electrifying." Kingston Whig-Standard




WRITERS & COMPANY
Knopf Canada
ISBN: 0-394-22738-7

Writers on Art, Life, Politics, Parents, Children, Faith, Writers & Writing...In Conversation with Eleanor Wachtel A collection of thought-provoking, engaging and stimulating interviews with some of the world's great writers by the acknowledged master of the literary interview, Eleanor Wachtel. Every Sunday afternoon CBC listeners across Canada have enjoyed the elegant and often intimate exchange of views, opinions and anecdotes between radio host Eleanor Wachtel and her guests. These acclaimed interviews are now available in book form. With great eloquence and thoughtfulness, an array of novelists, biographers, poets, essayists and journalists explore their preoccupations-- artistic, personal and political-- the influences on their writing, their fears and aspirations. Among them, Michael Ondaatje speaks about creating his novel The English Patient, A.S. Byatt conveys her excitement about the many different levels of "possession", Cynthia Ozick reflects upon the differences between her Jewish identity and her identity as a writer and how the two are mutually exclusive, Russell Banks, author of The Sweet Hereafter, discusses his inheritance of male violence and its effect on his writing. Highly entertaining, always revealing, the conversations in Writers & Company provide a rare view of the writer's world.

"Eleanor Wachtel is one of the few interviewers in existence equally skilled in print and on the air." - Kingston Whig-Standard