Conversations Year First Published: 1994 First Published by: Ontario Review Press Category: Non-Fiction This Edition: American first edition Softcover original ISBN: 0-86538-080-5

From the book jacket:

In these twenty-four provocative interviews spanning several decades, Doris Lessing talks frankly to a variety of interviewers - among them Joyce Carol Oates and Studs Terkel - about a wide range of subjects she is deeply concerned with. We hear about her early years in Southern Rhodesia, her involvement in Marxism and Sufism, her views on feminism, science fiction, the problems of autobiography, and her own fiction, especially The Golden Notebook. These conversations, informed by Ms. Lessing's unfailing intelligence and refreshing directness, present an invaluable and up-to-date view of the life and work of an distinguished contemporary writer.

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

• British Edition: Putting the Questions Differently
  
• A Visit with Doris Lessing by Joyce Carol Oates