Books: Talker

After clinging for so long to the solitude of his work and his Mississippi home, Novelist William (A Fable, The Sound and the Fury) Faulkner of late has been tasting—and enjoying—the pleasures of loquacity. In what might be called his transformation from hermitage to Hermitage (of a good year, of course), Faulkner has been reluctant to talk about the one subject he is most qualified to discuss—the art of writing. But for the new issue of the English-language quarterly, the Paris Review, Novelist Faulkner relented sufficiently to deliver some explicit comments on his...