Words Still Count With Me: A Chronicle of Literary Conversations - Hardcover

Herbert Mitgang has taught English and narrative writing at City College in New York and at Yale University.

A consummate man of letters, Mitgang has been a novelist, biographer, journalist, editor, and book critic for the New York Times. He also set himself the task of interviewing the authors he "most respected in the world." Mitgang succeeded, with one lamented exception (he never did interview Auden), and has now collected more than 60 of his superb, impressionistic author portraits in this invaluable volume. Mitgang did indeed interview the most outstanding writers of the century, including Jorge Luis Borges, Rebecca West, Vladimir Nabokov, Gunter Grass, Susan Sontag, Nadine Gordimer, Octavio Paz, John Cheever, John Hersey, Samuel Beckett, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Toni Morrison, and Umberto Eco. In his engaging introduction, Mitgang describes the more dramatic of these encounters and offers some strong commentary on the value of literature and the craft of interviewing. The interviews themselves are models of clarity and conciseness: Mitgang conveys a remarkable amount of information about each subject's personality and creative wellspring in just a few well-made pages. In closing, Mitgang dazzles us with a set of literary landscapes that describe places as diverse as Tokyo, Prague, and Santa Fe. Donna Seaman