How to Read a Novelist is the ultimate booklovers book.

John Freeman, author and editor of Granta magazine, has interviewed nearly every name in fiction and the literary world. In this collection Freeman has compiled the most insightful and fascinating of his interviews, essays and articles.

Paul Theroux on the state of sex in America, Margaret Atwood as inventor, John Updike as relationship advisor and Geoff Dyer as England's hippest middle-aged novelist, among many others including Philip Roth, Siri Hustevdt, Doris Lessing, Kirin Desai, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro, Tom Wolfe and Peter Carey.

Interviews, essays and articles:

Toni Morrison, 2004

Jonathan Safran Foer, 2005

Haruki Murakami, 2008

Richard Ford, 2007

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 2006

Gunter Grass, 2007

Nadine Gordimer, 2007

David Foster Wallace, 2006

Khaled Hosseini, 2007

Doris Lessing, 2006

Hisham Matar, 2007

Siri Hustvedt & Paul Auster, 2008

Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005

Charles Frazier, 2006

Edmund White, 2005

Geraldine Brooks, 2008

Imre Kertész, 2004

Oliver Sacks, 2007

Kiran Desai, 2006

Philip Roth, 2006

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 2006

Dave Eggers, 2005

Vikram Chandra, 2007

Adrienne Rich, 2006

Tom Wolfe, 2004

Robert M. Pirsig, 2006

Elif Shafak, 2007

Peter Carey, 2008

Mo Yan, 2012

Donna Leon, 2005

John Updike, 2003

Seamus Heaney, 2006

Joyce Carol Oates, 2007

Paul Theroux, 2005

Don DeLillo, 2006

Louise Erdrich, 2008

Norman Mailer, 2007

James Wood, 2008

Margaret Atwood, 2006

Mohsin Hamid, 2007

Richard Powers, 2006

Alan Hollinghurst, 2004

Ian McEwan, 2005

Caryl Phillips, 2005

Wole Soyinka, 2007

Salman Rushdie, 2005

Jim Crace, 2007

Marilynne Robinson, 2012

Edmundo Paz Soldán, 2006

Amitav Ghosh, 2008

Ayu Utami, 2006

Frank McCourt, 2005

Sebastian Junger, 2006

Geoff Dyer, 2003

A. S. Byatt, 2005

John Freeman is an award-winning writer and book critic who has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, Guardian and the Wall Street Journal. Freeman won the 2007 James Patterson Pageturner Award. He is the editor-in-chief of Granta and lives in New York City.

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'John Freeman's collection of interviews spans 56 giants of the literary world, nine years and an accumulated IQ reaching into the stratosphere.' Sunday Star Times

'Pure gold...Full of wit and wisdom; a buoy in the face of life's inevitable swats.' Insights Magazine

'Freeman's interviews transcend the mechanics of the encounters and, beyond smart and knowledgeable, he's the kind of interlocutor who asks a sideways question, then pays attention to the space and circumstance of the answer as much as to its words.' Weekend Australian