Putting the Questions Differently Interviews with Doris Lessing 1964-1994 Edited by Earl G. Ingersoll Year First Published: 1996 First Published by: Flamingo Category: Non-Fiction This Edition: British first edition Softcover original ISBN: 0-00-654850-4

From the book jacket:

Doris Lessing is now recognised as one of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century. She has addressed the most urgent concerns of our age, personal and political, through many diverse forms - novels, both traditional and experimental, short stories, plays, essays and journalism; she is a writer of extraordinary versatility.

These twenty-four interviews, many previously unpublished, span the last thirty years, and together make up the most wide-ranging and valuable commentary on her life and work. They include her thoughts on her early years as a communist and fledgling writer in Southern Rhodesia, her views on marriage, the family and feminism, on other writers from Tolstoy to Lawrence, and on her later experiments in psychotherapy and mysticism; and she speaks about how all these preoccupations have influenced her own writing, from The Golden Notebook to her acclaimed autobiographical masterpiece Under My Skin.

The book is illuminated throughout by Doris Lessing's characteristic directness and clarity. It is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand not just Doris Lessing, but also the profound impact she has had on our age.

Included in this edition:

Talking as a Person by Roy Newquist
The Inadequacy of the Imagination by Jonah Raskin
Learning to Put the Questions Differently by Studs Terkel
One Keeps Going by Joyce Carol Oates
The Capacity to Look at a Situation Coolly by Josephine Hendin
Creating Your Own Demand by Minda Bikman
Testimony to Mysticism by Nissa Torrents
The Need to Tell Stories by Christopher Bigsby
Writing as Time Runs Out by Michael Dean
Running Through Stories in My Mind by Michael Thorpe
Placing Their Fingers on the Wounds of Our Times by Margarete von Schwarzkopf
Breaking Down These Forms by Stephen Gray
Acknowledging a New Frontier by Eve Bertelsen
The Habit of Observing by Francois-Olivier Rousseau
Caged by the Experts by Thomas Frick
Living in Catastrophe by Brian Aldiss
Watching the Angry and Destructive Hordes Go by by Claire Tomalin
Drawn to a Type of Landscape by Sedge Thomson
A Writer Is Not a Professor by Jean-Maurice de Montremy
The Older I Get, the Less I Believe by Tan Gim Ean
Unexamined Mental Attitudes Left Behind by Communism by Edith Kurzweil
Reporting from the Terrain of the Mind by Nigel Forde
Voice of England, Voice of Africa by Michael Upchurch
Describing This Beautiful and Nasty Planet by Earl G. Ingersoll

• American Edition: Conversations
  
• A Visit with Doris Lessing by Joyce Carol Oates