Janet Malcolm: The Last Interview

“Janet Malcolm was, with Joan Didion, by far the most influential literary journalist of her time—and by ‘literary journalist’ I mean not someone who writes journalism about literature but someone who takes journalistic occasions to make literature happen.” —Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon

“As a personage, on the page, she was daunting: fiercely smart, relentlessly analytic, with a cool precision in her turn of phrase. I could have skipped J-school and just read Janet instead.” —Rebecca Mead, author of My Life in Middlemarch

“When I started out as a magazine writer, Janet Malcolm was my idol. She still is.” —Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club

“Janet was an absolute master at structure, at dosing narrative information along a dramatic arc, and a master of the distilled scene, a bit of dialogue or behavior that illuminates a cultural type.” —David Salle, artist
 
“Reading Janet Malcolm is so thrilling because it makes you realize as a nonfiction writer, the sky’s the limit. The writing itself on a sentence level is just bananas... It’s crackling with intelligence.” —Ariel Levy, author of The Rules Do Not Apply