The New Orleans Review, founded in 1968, “began at a moment of great anxiety and great vitality but most importantly at a moment of great change,” says longtime editor John Biguenet in the introduction of Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance. “We described ourselves as a magazine of discovery, both in introducing new writers and also in introducing new areas of coverage for a literary magazine.”
One of the methods of that discovery was the journal’s use of author interviews, which offered “fascinating takes by creators on their creations,” as current NOR editor Mark Yakich describes them. Now, 50 years later, Yakich and Biguenet have compiled some of the best of those interviews in Interviews from the Edge, an anthology that examines both the art of literature and the social issues of the last 50 years.
A short list of some of the writers, poets, and activists interviewed include:
- Joseph Heller
- Sister Helen Prejean
- James Baldwin
- Eudora Welty
- Jorge Luis Borges
- John Ashbery
- Francine Prose
- Viet Thanh Nguyen
The Seattle Book Review calls it “a fascinating half century of conversations with some of the most influential writers of the last hundred years,” while the Library Journal says the interviews “offer perspectives on aesthetics and the realities of resistance that will appeal to a range of writers and readers.”
