The highest purpose of storytelling is to shift the perception of what's possible in the universe. The writing process is not mysterious. It is not uncontrollable. You just think it is. This book can help. David Gerrold, award-winning screenwriter and novelist, gives advice for would-be science fiction and fantasy writers, covering such topics as setting, plot, character, and dialogue, as well as the mechanics of grammar, tense, sentence structure, and paragraph transition... and why the heck you're writing at all.

Spanning three decades of his literary career, from Catch-22 to comments on the Persian Gulf War, Conversations with Joseph Heller contains a selection of the most significant, informative, and interesting interviews with one of America's foremost novelists. In these interviews Heller reveals his interest in the structure, effects, and themes of his works, his satirical purposes, the influences upon him, his writing methods, his political opinions, and a host of other topics that challenge and engage his lively and reflective mind. Included here are two interviews not previously published, interviews from student newspapers and university magazines, and two highly comic ""anti-interviews"" with close friends Mel Brooks and George Mandel. Here are two largely serious interviews with his friends Robert Alan Aurthur and Barbara Gelb. Also in this collection are Heller's conversations with authors Martin Amis and George Plimpton and a probing exchange with Bill Moyers about democracy, politics, and Heller's Picture This. Among the interviews are his talks with Sam Merrill in Playboy, Paul Krassner of The Realist, and with Chet Flippo of Rolling Stone.

The interviews in this collection will convince the reader that Jerzy Kosinski's public persona was one of the greatest creations. Few authors were ever more adept at press interviews. For Kosinski, the author of nine novels, including The Painted Bird, Steps, Being There , and The Hermit of 69th Street , the interview was part performance, part public relations, part blind date. Kosinski in person was different from the existential adventurer in his novels. He was not so much engaged as engaging. though his fiction was brutal, he was charming. The contrast between Kosinski and the intensity of his fiction created the backdrop for his interviews. Like his readers, Kosinski's interviews were obsessed with the facts of his life. As a young boy he survived the Holocaust. He escaped Communist Poland. His life became the stuff of novels. He came to the United States with little money and no command of the English, but within a year he was a Ford Fellow at Columbia University and not long afterward was married to an American heiress and was living on Park Avenue. Yet Kosinski felt that his unique experiences, when transmuted to fiction, became a didactic lesson for others. A human being is loaded with the greatest power, he says in one interview, his imagination and the power to transcend his own conditions. The interviews here are published chronologically without abridgement. The same questions recur and Kosinski's answers are filled with discrepancies and contradictions. A good interview, he once wrote, is like truth itself, the temporary resolution of various contradictions. These compelling conversations recapture part of Jerzy Kposinski, who took his own life on May 3, 1991.