IF YOU’RE A READER YOU might, sometimes, think of meeting your favourite author. There’s plenty of opportunity these days — Martin Amis at Cheltenham, Margaret Atwood at Hay . . . why not? Philip Gourevitch, the new(ish) editor of the venerable — and wonderful — literary magazine The Paris Review, understands, but sounds a note of caution: “The reason that people go to readings, to author appearances, is that as they get involved with an author’s work, they often think they are having some sort of relationship with the author. And many people imagine being able to talk to such a person, or be around them.

“If it ever happens, they are usually bitterly disappointed because the writer is a boor or a slob or concerned only with his finances, or trying to pick you up. And you think, ‘I thought he was so high-minded!’ The Paris Review interviews are a kind of idealised version of that meeting. We cut out all the boring parts.”

Which is not to say that Amis or Atwood might be boorish or boring; it’s simply that the interviews with writers that appear in The Paris Review are unlike any other for their breadth, depth, insight and empathy.

Since 1953, when the magazine was founded by the pioneering journalist George Plimpton, The Paris Review has been the place where readers can turn when they want to know how the minds of great writers work.

Now, the publisher Canongate is making this remarkable quarterly more easily accessible by distributing it in Britain; this month the current issue, Winter 2006, No179, will arrive — and the first volume of Gourevitch’s selection of Paris Review interviews will be published.

On an overcast winter’s day in New York City, I am sitting with Gourevitch in his airy office on White Street in Lower Manhattan. It’s a few days before Christmas, but most of the staff, who number only half a dozen, seem to be in, and the place has the unmistakable feeling of an office where people feel lucky and happy to work. Plimpton ran this American and international literary institution from the basement of his brownstone on the classy Upper East Side. After his death in

2003, Gourevitch — a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of two acclaimed books of nonfiction, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda and A Cold Case — stepped in.

One wouldn’t go so far as to say that Gourevitch has given his charge a downtown feel, but he is keen for the magazine to keep the edge that it had when it was publishing early work by Italo Calvino, V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth . . . and more great writers than it is easy to name.

Why read these interviews when writers are profiled all the time? Never mind that Ernest Hemingway is no longer available for interview; Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion and Peter Carey were recent subjects. Read the interviews because they are not profiles. Rather they are in-depth conversations about the craft of writing.

They are not, by and large, about a writer’s love life, or political opinions: they are about what a writer does. Kurt Vonnegut, in his Paris Review interview, refers to writing simply as a trade: “Carpenters build houses. Storytellers use a reader’s leisure time in such a way that the reader will not feel that his time has been wasted. Mechanics fix automobiles.”

You’ll learn what drives Hemingway or Vonnegut, Borges or Didion, the restlessness, the curiosity, the plain hard graft.

If you think this would be of interest only to writers, think again. “These are about as accessible a form of shop-talk as you can get,” Gourevitch says. “The interviews were conceived as an alternative to, and a repudiation of, highbrow literary criticism as a response to good writing.

“Good writing is usually readable by non-writers, by a broad public. So it doesn’t seem to make sense that writing about writing should exclude them, or be a coded language or inside affair. This isn’t economics, or the science of high genetics. It’s about people’s lives, and it’s in accessible language. It’s not that it’s not intelligent, sophisticated, self-aware, it’s just available — and entertaining.”

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