An incisive collection of interviews with one of the leading lights of American writing.

Joyce Carol Oates has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award.

In her acceptance speech for the National Book Award in 1970, Joyce Carol Oates remarked that "language is all we have to pit against death and silence." In this remarkable new collection of interviews spanning more than 35 years of Oates's career, she talks candidly and insightfully about literature, the writing life, her background, and many other topics. These interviews should interest not only Oates's many fans but anyone who cares about contemporary American literature.

The interviews range from Robert Phillip's in The Paris Review to Lawrence Grobel's in Playboy. Though previously published, often in literary magazines, the majority have never appeared in book form.

From the Interviews:

"If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function—a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind—then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Generally I've found this to be true: I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything."

"I take my writing seriously, but I don't take myself seriously…that is, I don't feel pontifical or dogmatic. Writing is an absolutely fascinating activity, an immersion in drama, language, and vision."