On Hilary Mantel

Archival selections from The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books.

The Paris Review Redux: free interviews, stories, poems, and art from the archives of The Paris Review. View this email in your browser Lincoln Perry, Forum East; Overcast, 2000. From a portfolio in issue no. 218.  Our summer subscription deal continues: through Labor Day, subscribe to both The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books for a combined price of $119 ($70 off the regular price!). You'll receive yearlong subscriptions to both publications and access to their complete digital archives.  To mark the occasion, this week we're unlocking complementary pieces from both archives. Read The Paris Review's Art of Fiction interview with Hilary Mantel in issue no. 212, alongside "How It Must Have Been," Stephen Greenblatt's essay in The New York Review of Books on Mantel's historical novel Wolf Hall. INTERVIEW The Art of Fiction No. 226 Hilary Mantel    INTERVIEWER Have other contemporary writers been important to your development? Sebald? Munro? McEwan? MANTEL What I was starting to say earlier, about influences, is that, in my case at least, they are not especially "literary." Your worldview is acquired not just from novels, but from all sorts of books. The big event in my life was getting an adult library card when I was fourteen, because that meant I was free. But while I was reading my way earnestly, with great dedication, through the French and the Russians, I was also reading Marx. That was just as ­important, probably more important. Among writers themselves, the question is not who influences you, but which people give you courage.  From issue no. 212 (Spring 2015) THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS How It Must Have Been Stephen Greenblatt   Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is a startling achievement, a brilliant historical novel focused on the rise to power of a figure exceedingly unlikely, on the face of things, to arouse any sympathy at all. To be sure, one could imagine worse: we are not being invited to enter the life of, say, Stalin's sinister henchman Lavrenti Beria. But Thomas Cromwell, the focus of Mantel's loving attention for almost six hundred pages, is not that distant from the bureaucratic architect of the Great Purge. This is not Oliver Cromwell, the towering Puritan revolutionary, regicide, and Lord Protector, that we are talking about; it is his older kinsman, related by one of those tenuous lines of descent that excite the genealogically obsessed. November 5, 2009   Copyright © 2024 The Paris Review. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: The Paris Review 544 West 27th Street 3rd Floor New York, New York 10001 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe, if you must.