{"id":101054,"date":"2016-08-01T18:12:09","date_gmt":"2016-08-01T22:12:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=101054"},"modified":"2016-08-02T10:24:49","modified_gmt":"2016-08-02T14:24:49","slug":"now-online-our-interviews-with-robert-caro-and-luc-sante","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/01\/now-online-our-interviews-with-robert-caro-and-luc-sante\/","title":{"rendered":"Now Online: Our Interviews with Robert Caro and Luc Sante"},"content":{"rendered":"

Because your summer is a never-ending slog and all your beach reads have disappointed you, we thought you\u2019d want to peruse these two<\/a> interviews<\/a>\u00a0from our Spring issue. Once available only to subscribers, they\u2019re now available to everyone, everywhere. No need to thank us. (Unless you want to subscribe<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Sante-1976\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the Art of Nonfiction No. 9, Luc Sante<\/a>\u00a0discusses the role other media have played in his writing and editing process:<\/p>\n

\n

Everybody always gets photographs wrong. It\u2019s not that photographs don\u2019t lie. It\u2019s that photographs tell the truth about the things they don\u2019t think are important, and those are the things that you may think are important. Painting can do that, too. Painting can have a documentary value that way. I\u2019ve learned a lot from film, photography, and painting. They inform my work to this day. And music, obviously\u2014music more than any of the others. Editing a sentence is a musical process. You have the massed horns at the beginning, the abrupt cutoff at the end\u2014those kinds of things. I\u2019ll think of Ornette Coleman, or I\u2019ll think of Wire. It helps \u00addevelop the architecture of the work. And I\u2019m always conscious of the visual. I tend to root what I write in the visual, the experiential.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(If you want to read Luc on photography, check out his column for the\u00a0Daily<\/em><\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\"Caro-recent-JoyceRavid\"<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

And in the Art of Biography\u00a0No. 5,\u00a0Robert Caro<\/a>\u2014the author of\u00a0The Power Broker<\/em>, who has devoted himself to a five-volume life of Lyndon Johnson since 1976\u2014talks about a biographer\u2019s duties beyond the conveyance of facts:<\/p>\n

\n

You have to ask yourself, Are you making the reader see\u00a0<\/em>the scene? And that means, Can you<\/em> see the scene? You look at so many books, and it seems like all the writer cares about is getting the facts in. But the facts alone aren\u2019t enough \u2026 I can\u2019t start writing a book until I\u2019ve thought it through and can see it whole in my mind. So before I start writing, I boil the book down to three paragraphs, or two or one\u2014that\u2019s when it comes into view.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For the latest\u00a0in our Writers at Work series, subscribe to The Paris Review<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/i>now.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Because your summer is a never-ending slog and all your beach reads have disappointed you, we thought you\u2019d want to peruse these two interviews\u00a0from our Spring issue. Once available only to subscribers, they\u2019re now available to everyone, everywhere. No need to thank us. (Unless you want to subscribe.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2559],"tags":[1132,21347,19958,454,23645,7035,21349,15938,12913,23644,10113],"class_list":["post-101054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bulletin","tag-interviews","tag-issue-216","tag-low-life","tag-luc-sante","tag-lyndon-b-johnson","tag-robert-caro","tag-the-art-of-biography","tag-the-art-of-nonfiction","tag-the-other-paris","tag-the-power-broker","tag-writers-at-work"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNow Online: Our Interviews with Robert Caro and Luc Sante<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The latest interviews in our iconic Writers at Work series are now available in full online.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/01\/now-online-our-interviews-with-robert-caro-and-luc-sante\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Now Online: Our Interviews with Robert Caro and Luc Sante by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 1, 2016 \u2013 Because your summer is a never-ending slog and all your beach reads have disappointed you, we thought you\u2019d want to peruse these two interviews\u00a0from our\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/01\/now-online-our-interviews-with-robert-caro-and-luc-sante\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-08-01T22:12:09+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-08-02T14:24:49+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/sante-1976-1.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"639\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"392\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/01\/now-online-our-interviews-with-robert-caro-and-luc-sante\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/01\/now-online-our-interviews-with-robert-caro-and-luc-sante\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Dan Piepenbring\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/6b16ca558fc538230f135c3220dfd3c8\"},\"headline\":\"Now Online: Our Interviews with Robert Caro and Luc Sante\",\"datePublished\":\"2016-08-01T22:12:09+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-08-02T14:24:49+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/01\/now-online-our-interviews-with-robert-caro-and-luc-sante\/\"},\"wordCount\":388,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/01\/now-online-our-interviews-with-robert-caro-and-luc-sante\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/sante-1976-1.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"interviews\",\"Issue 216\",\"Low Life\",\"Luc Sante\",\"Lyndon B. 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