From Library Journal
Compiling these 16 interviews with Kingston, dating from 1977 to 1996 and dealing with The Woman Warrior (LJ 9/15/76), China Men (LJ 6/15/80), and Tripmaster Monkey (LJ 4/1/89), seems like a great idea. However, without faulting either Kingston or the interviewers, this collection has more than a few flaws. Since Kingston cannot change her girlhood or the influences on her writing, and the interviewers cannot avoid asking about them, the same points get repeated endlessly; and Kingston's responses to her critics are not balanced by the inclusion of the criticism itself. Although Kingston proves articulate, generous, and patient in sharing her thoughts on a variety of subjects (e.g., the writing experience, peace, and being Asian), influences (e.g., William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, and Walt Whitman), and her life, the excellent 20-page introduction summing up the interviews and the five-page chronology putting everything neatly in place seem quite sufficient. Recommended only for large public libraries.?Kitty Chen Dean, Nassau Coll., Garden City, NYCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Card catalog description
"In this collection of interviews, Kingston talks about her life, her writing, and her objectives. From the first, her books have hovered along the hazy line between fiction and nonfiction, memoir and imagination. As she answers her critics and readers, she both clarifies the differences and exults in the difficulties of distinguishing between the remembered and the re-created."--BOOK JACKET. "She explains how she worked to bridge her parents' Chinese dialect with American slang, how she learned to explore her inheritance and find new relevance in her mother's "talk-stories," and how she developed the complex juxtapositions of myths and memoir that fill her books."--BOOK JACKET.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this collection of interviews, Kingston talks about her life, her writing, and her objectives. From the first, her books have hovered along the hazy line between fiction and nonfiction, memoir and imagination. As she answers her critics and readers, she both clarifies the differences and exults in the difficulties of distinguishing between the remembered and the re-created. She explains how she worked to bridge her parents' Chinese dialect with American slang, how she learned to explore her inheritance and find new relevance in her mother's "talk-stories," and how she developed the complex juxtapositions of myths and memoir that fill her books.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal