A beautiful interview collection built around a very good premise: what writers do with dreams, and what dreams do to writing.

Epel gathers an unusually broad group — novelists, poets, children’s authors, comics people, dramatists — and asks them not for career advice sludge but for the stranger material underneath the work. The result is part craft book, part literary gossip, part accidental group portrait of late twentieth-century writing culture.

Because the contributors include people as different as Maya Angelou, Art Spiegelman, Isabel Allende, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Amy Tan, John Barth, Sue Grafton, Maurice Sendak and others, the book keeps shifting register in a useful way.

It catches authors speaking in a more intimate, irrational register than standard interview books usually allow. Dreams become a way into memory, superstition, image-making, fear, and method. 

Bookman Press paperback, first edition, 1993.