It's no slight to the rest of the Paris Review's table of contents to say that most readers turn straight to the interview. Many things have changed at the venerable quarterly since Philip Gourevitch assumed the helm in 2005, but the famed interview remains. A staple of each issue since the first (which featured E.M. Forster), the Paris Review interview provides a rare glimpse into the minds and working habits of the most important writers, dramatists, and poets — and occasionally critics and editors — of the last half century. The exceptions to the list — Samuel Beckett, W. Somerset Maugham, and Richard Wright — prove its worth, and surely it's just a matter of time before we hear from J.M. Coetzee, Jos— Saramago, and Cormac McCarthy (Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger aren't returning calls, clearly).

In 2007, the first of a projected four volumes of interviews appeared; and this, the second, is every bit as strong as the premiere. The big names — William Faulkner, Gabriel García Márquez, Alice Munro — are present and accounted for, but some writers whose readership was never proportional to their talent are as well, and they can make for the best reading of the bunch. For example, most of John Gardner's books are out of print now, and yet his impassioned advocacy for fiction that forges a third way between meta-fiction and realism is enough to send one running to the nearest used-book store. Philip Larkin cheated — he would only agree to be interviewed by mail, and his prepared answers are some of the most entertaining of the collection ("Sheer genius," he replied, when asked where he got the idea for one of his poems).

Taken in sum, though, what emerges is a picture of the qualities that all great writers share despite their many differences: each is a voracious reader who writes out of a deep-seated need. Writing is hard, lonely work, and from the interviews, one gets the sense that the writers are puzzled over why anyone would want to know about the process. But somehow, knowing that Beloved was written with Dixon Ticonderoga No. 2 soft pencils only increases its accomplishment.

-Chris Parris-Lamb