The novel is alive and well, thank you very much
For the last fifteen years, whenever a novel was published, John Freeman
was there to greet it. As a critic for more than two hundred newspapers
worldwide, the onetime president of the National Book Critics Circle,
and the former editor of Granta, he has reviewed thousands of books
and interviewed scores of writers. In How to Read a Novelist, which
pulls together his very best profiles (many of them new or completely
rewritten for this volume) of the very best novelists of our time, he
shares with us what he's learned.
From such international stars as Doris Lessing, Haruki Murakami, Salman
Rushdie, and Mo Yan, to established American lions such as Don DeLillo,
Norman Mailer, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Philip Roth, John
Updike, and David Foster Wallace, to the new guard of Edwidge Danticat,
Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, and more, Freeman has talked to
everyone.
What emerges is an instructive and illuminating, definitive yet still
idiosyncratic guide to a diverse and lively literary culture: a vision
of the novel as a varied yet vital contemporary form, a portrait of the
novelist as a unique and profound figure in our fragmenting global
culture, and a book that will be essential reading for every aspiring
writer and engaged reader--a perfect companion (or gift!) for anyone
who's ever curled up with a novel and wanted to know a bit more about
the person who made it possible.
