Books in the Literary Conversations series

When Jimmy Carter (b. 1924) lost the presidency in 1980, it would have been reasonable to think his public life was coming to an end. The moderate, evangelical, blue-jeans-wearing peanut farmer made an unlikely governor of Georgia, and an even less likely winner of the vicious 1976 Democratic presidential primary. Coming into an era of American politics where evangelical and rural voters became increasingly identified with the Reagan revolution, and the Democratic Party's identity became increasingly secular and urban, he did not fit neatly into the political categories of the emerging decade. But it was not politics that would define President Carter in the end: it would be his humble Christian faith and his enduring commitment to the poor, to peace, and to human rights. In Conversations with Jimmy Carter, ten interviews, drawn from Carter's five decades as a national public figure and author, capture the complexities and contradictions that have defined him--and that have helped to both reflect and shape the highest aspirations of the American experiment.

Ken Kesey (1935-2001) is the author of several works of well-known fiction and other hard-to-classify material. These interviews trace his arc through success, fame, prison, farming, and tragedy. These conversations make clear Kesey's central place in American culture and offer his enduring lesson that the freedom exists to create lives as wildly as can be imagined.

Interviews with the queer Jamaican-born Canadian speculative fiction writer and editor known for her novels Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon's Arms, The Chaos, and Sister Mine