The World Split Open ─ Great Authors on How and Why We Write

Since 1984, Literary Arts has welcomed many of the world’s most renowned authors and storytellers to its stage for one of the country’s largest lectures series. Sold-out crowds congregate at Portland’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall to hear these writers’ discuss their work and their thoughts on the trajectory of contemporary literature and culture. In celebration of Literary Arts’ 30-year anniversary, A Literary Arts Readers collects highlights from the series in a single volume. Whether it’s Wallace Stegner exploring how we use fiction to make sense of life or Ursula K. Le Guin on where ideas come from, Margaret Atwood on the need for complex female characters or Robert Stone on morality and truth in literature, Edward P. Jones on the role of imagination in historical novels or Marilynne Robinson on the nature of beauty, these essays illuminate not just the world of letters but the world at large.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria. She is the author of Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. The Thing Around Your Neck, her collection of stories, was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in Africa. The recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, she was named by the New Yorker as one of the twenty most important fiction writers today under forty years old. Her most recent novel, Americanah, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the Heartland Prize, and was named one of the New York Times Book Review’s Ten Best Books of the Year.

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Her newest novel, MaddAddam (2013), is the follow-up to The Year of the Flood (2009) and her Giller Prize winner, Oryx and Crake (2009). Other recent publications include The Door, a volume of poetry (2007), Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008), and In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011). Additional titles include the 2000 Booker Prize?winning The Blind Assassin, Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy, The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Penelopiad. Atwood lives in Toronto with the writer Graeme Gibson.

Russell Banks is the prize-winning author of seventeen books of fiction, including the novels Continental Drift and Cloudsplitter, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Two of his novels, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, have been made into critically acclaimed, prize-winning films. He has published six collections of short stories, most recently A Permanent Member of the Family. His work is widely translated, and in 2010 he was made an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Minister of Culture of France. He is the former president of the International Parliament of Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was the New York State Author, 2004?2008, and in 2014 was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame. He resides in upstate New York and Miami Beach, Florida.

E. L. Doctorow’s work has been published in thirty-two languages. His novels include Andrew’s Brain, The March, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Waterworks, and Homer and Langley. He has published three volumes of short fiction, Lives of the Poets, Sweet Land Stories, and All the Time in the World, and three collections of essays, Creationists, Reporting the Universe (The Harvard-Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization), and Jack London, Hemingway and the Constitution. There have been five film adaptations of his work. Among his honors are the National Book Award, two Pen/Faulkner Awards, three National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, the Gold Medal for fiction of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal.

Edward P. Jones, a New York Times best-selling author, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Ursula Kroeber Le Guin was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California, and lives in Portland, Oregon. As of 2014, she has published twenty