St. Martin's First: Winter 2015 Sampler

If you could meet one deceased literary figure, who would that be? What would you ask? What would you say, and why? In AfterWord: Conjuring the Literary Dead, eighteen distinguished authors respond to this challenge by creating imagined conversations with a constellation of British and American authors, from Samuel Johnson to Jane Austen to Samuel Beckett to Edith Wharton.

Each chapter embarks on an intellectual, emotional, and often humorous voyage as the layers of time are peeled away, letting readers experience authors as they really were in their own era or, on occasion, transported to the present. As eccentric as it is eclectic, this collection takes the audience on a dizzying descent into a literary Inferno where biographers, novelists, and critics eat the food of the dead and return to tell the tale. Readers will take great pleasure in seeing what happens when scholars are loosed from the chains of fact and conduct imaginary interviews with deceased authors.

Covering 200 years of literary history, the essays in AfterWord draw upon the lifelong, consuming interest of the contributors, each fashioning a vivid, credible portrait of a vulnerable, driven, fully human character. As contributors appeal to what Margaret Atwood calls in her introduction the deep human desire to "go to the land of the dead, to bring back to the living someone who has gone there," readers are privy to questions that have seldom been asked, to incidents that have been suppressed, to some of the secrets that have puzzled readers for years, and to novel literary truths about the essential natures of each author.

Catherine Aird-"Rudyard Kipling: Thinking in Ink"

Brian Aldiss-"Meeting the Artist: Thomas Hardy"

Margaret Atwood-"Descent: Negotiating with the Dead"

William M. Chace-"Ezra Pound: Rapallo, 1927"

Nora Crook-"The Aziola and the Moth: The Shelleys at the Bagni di Pisa"

Paul Delany-"George Gissing: Why Should I Die, If I Can Help It?"

Colin Dexter-"Questions for the Master: Alfred Edward Housman"

Margaret Drabble-"Arnold Bennett: A Great Man"

Peter Firchow-"Orwell's Ghosts: A Play in One Act"

Alan W. Friedman-"One Word Less: Questioning Samuel Beckett"

Eugene Goodheart--"Jane Austen's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman"

John Halperin-"A Tardy Talk with Edith Wharton"

Francis King-"Oscar Wilde: May I Say Nothing?"

Jeffrey Meyers-"Sometimes Counsel Take, and Sometimes Tea: Samuel Johnson at Home"

Cynthia Ozick-"An (Unfortunate) Interview with Henry James"

Jay Parini-"A Visit with Mr. Frost"

Carl Rollyson-"William Faulkner: As I Lay Dreaming"

Dale Salwak amd Laura Nagy-"Introduction: The Crucible of the Imagination"

Alan Sillitoe-"Talking with Joseph Conrad"

Ann Thwaite-"A Travelling Coincidence"

Dale Salwak is a professor of English at Citrus College. He is a frequent contributor to the London TIMES, the author of numerous books including Teaching Life: Letters from a Life in Literature (Iowa, 2008), Kingsley Amis: Modern Novelist and Carl Sandburg: A Reference Guide, and the editor of The Wonders of Solitude, Anne Tyler as Novelist (Iowa, 1994), Philip Larkin: The Man and His Work (Iowa, 1989), and The Life and Work of Barbara Pym (Iowa, 1987).