Conversations with Pauline Kael
Conversations with Pauline Kael brings together roughly half of Kael’s published interviews along with a lively debate between Kael and Jean-Luc Godard. Collectively, the interviews provide rewarding perspectives on Kael’s aesthetics, her politics, and her perceptions about what it is she does as a critic. They also contain discussions of films that Kael did not have the chance to review or that were released after her retirement in 1991.
This collection of her interviews will provide new and renewed pleasures for readers who have valued Kael’s critical voice and her challenges to consensus during the second half of the twentieth century.
Will Brantley is professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University. He is author of Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir: Smith, Glasgow, Welty, Hellman, Porter, and Hurston and coeditor (with Nancy McGuire Roche) of Conversations with Edmund White, both published by University Press of Mississippi.