Interviewing writers ...

For the most part, novelists submit to interviews good-humoredly enough, pretending not to notice the demands that interviews make of them, or the fact that interviews undermine as much as validate their work. But alongside the history of traditional author interviews, smoothly unfolding over the past hundred and thirty years, runs a seam of fictional interviews in which writers probe and mock and complain about the form. In November, Granta published “Dead Interviews,” in which living writers interview famous dead people. Cynthia Ozick takes tea with Henry James, Rebecca Miller visits the Marquis de Sade in the Bastille, and so on. The interviewers are often ignorant or crass, and the interviewees are puzzled, evasive, or angry—as if the live writers are using dead ones to say what they’ve been suppressing for years.