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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These twenty-four interviews, many previously unpublished, span the last thirty years, and together make up the most wide-ranging and valuable commentary on her life and work.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
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