the dharma blog

The Paris Review has interviewed almost 300 authors whose work has defined the literary landscape of latter half of the twentieth century. From its first interview with E.M. Forster, the Writers at Work series has, in the words of The New York Times, “set the standard for literary interrogation.” Now the Paris Review Foundation proposes to make this vast archival resource–what has felicitously been referred to as the DNA of Literature–available online, for free, to anyone who visits the Paris Review website. In addition to the interview itself, the website will feature author photos, images of original manuscript pages, a special forum in which authors will be able to revise or expand their original interviews, and links to pages that provide up-to-date biographical information about the authors. A customized search engine will allow a reader not only to search by name and date, but also to search the full text of the interviews so that, for instance, a search for Gabriel García Márquez will turn up his interview along with every other interview in which his name is mentioned.

The project will launch in mid-November of 2005, beginning with the interviews from the 1950s. These will be followed by interviews from subsequent decades, until all the interviews are available.