Passion and craft

The twelve contemporary fiction writers interviewed in Passion and Craft go beyond the usual chatting about career and technique, beyond the merely autobiographical. Readers will discover many personal and artistic differences: T. Coraghessan Boyle's self-aware hipness, Andre Dubus's spiritual strength in the face of physical disability. Rick Bass's commitment to environmental concerns. Richard Ford, a recent winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN-Faulkner Award, describes how he takes control over his own material; and, in one of the few lengthy interviews she has ever granted, Gina Berriault, the 1997 winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award, speaks movingly about the "gaps and silences" in a woman writer's life.