For whom the spell holds

INTERVIEWERS, MARGARET Atwood once wrote, are like dancing partners. Some of them know what they are doing and can lead a writer in a head-turning waltz round the room. Others blunder blindly, not knowing any of the steps but improvising wildly. There is, however, a third kind, and it's one she warned writers always to be on their guard for: the type who, while waltzing with apparent ease, deliberately tread on the author's feet as painfully as they can.

That's not the way things are done at the Paris Review. As Capote, Hemingway, Eliot, Bellow, Borges and at least 300 more of the world's finest writers have discovered over the last five decades, this is a magazine that prides itself on setting the gold standard of author interviews, where the writer can expect an Astair and Rogers waltz rather than a stamped-on toe.

For the writer, the deal is simple. No trick questions. Nothing intrusive, personal: unlike the rest of the media, the Paris Review won't concentrate on the links between writers' lives and what they write about. Nothing that's going to help sell their latest book either: to the pure souls at the Paris Review, marketing hype is heresy. The writers are shown the interview long before it appears in print: if they don't like any single word of it, out it goes: if they want, they can rewrite any or all of the interview themselves (as Kurt Vonnegut did). And they can take their time, too: some Paris Review interviews have taken years to appear in print.

Philip Gourevitch, the magazine's editor, who has just put together a dazzling collection of some of its best pieces, is himself enough of a journalist to know how fawning all of this sounds. When he was writing We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with our Families, his searing 1996 study of the Rwanda massacres, he would not have accepted such obsequious terms on which to conduct interviews with the survivors. Nor would he when he was researching A Cold Case, his 2002 account of the reopening of a decades-old New York murder case that reads like a real-life Elmore Leonard novel. What makes interviewing writers so different?

At his desk in the New York office he shares with just four other staff, Gourevitch is unrepentant. Writers aren't politicians, he says: they don't need to lie. Putting them in the same room as a point-scoring interviewer isn't the best way to understand how and why they do what they do.

"What you've got to remember is that when these interviews began, they really were a new form," he says. "It wasn't just that they were detailed and in depth, but just the very idea of interviewing authors. These days you can barely publish a book without doing interviews about it, so now the biggest challenge is getting past the answers that have been honed - not necessarily because the author is so slick but by the sheer repetitiveness of the questions they are always asked. You've got to go deeper, make the interviewees stretch and say something fresh, and these interviews do that."

In the beginning it was easier. Dorothy Parker would come straight out and say that no, she never spent as much time as everyone thinks at the Algonquin ("it cost too much"), hated her reputation for being a "smartcracker" and admitted she hadn't been funny for 20 years. Rebecca West would be intimidatingly forthright about how Somerset Maugham "couldn't write for toffee" and why TS Eliot was a poseur and Tolstoy wildly overrated. Hemingway - in what is one of the most famous author interviews ever - would talk about how hanging oneself (and being cut down just in time) would make ideal training for any would-be writer.

And while the Paris Review's format occasionally runs the risk of fetishising the writer (who really cares whether they work in longhand and at what time of the day?), in one respect at least it works very well indeed. Because at least half of the encounter is an ego-less one, the writer's own character comes through all the stronger. With Borges, it's the shyness, gentility and manners; with Bellow, the caution that, even in such a protected interview format, makes him cut out his own jokes and be wary of talking about his younger self; with James M Cain, in his last-ever interview, an old newspaperman's heart-warming directness.

There's another reason we read interviews with writers: they are magicians whose tricks haunt our minds; we cannot help wonder how they are done. So we listen when Billy Wilder comes along and says that "Nobody's perfect", the immortal final line of Some Like It Hot, was something he had always meant to change but ran out of time to do before they shot the scene; or when Hemingway explains that he rewrote the last page of For Whom the Bell Tolls 39 times; or when James M Cain talks about the difference between good dialogue on the page and in a film script. And, because these are masters of their craft - and so pretention-free - we learn.

Gourevitch is proud of the Paris Review's interview tradition, and argues convincingly that maintaining it is all the more vital in an age such as our own. "We're always hearing about the death of print - and so a magazine like ours, which comes out quarterly, sounds anachronistic. For getting hard news, it is: we go straight to the web for that and have done for the last four or five years, which is why these are hard times for daily newspapers. But these are actually good times for quarterlies like us, or magazines like the Economist and the New Yorker, because if our culture is getting shallower in some ways, it's getting deeper in others. There's a huge audience out there for what we do - producing something that is so completely the opposite of blogging." Only a small part ("less than a thousand") of that audience is British, but its numbers might increase as a result of a distribution deal Gourevitch signed last year with Canongate.

He's been in charge for a year and a half, but so far has made only marginal changes to the magazine's format. The interviews haven't speeded up (one he ran recently with Stephen King had been six years in the works); they still fight shy of concentrating on the author's life (so Salman Rushdie, for example, will talk as extensively about the importance of a good editor as about living under the shadow of the fatwah); the rate of unsolicited submissions used is still not much more than one in 20,000, with each manuscript still read by two assessors.

Finding good new short stories is, however, getting increasingly hard. "This isn't a great period for short stories in the US. That always coincides with great marketing opportunities for them, and right now they're shrinking, with Esquire and Atlantic barely publishing stories any more. You'd think that's all good for us because it means that we get a bigger choice, but in reality it means that fewer people are writing short stories now and everyone's switching into novels, so you've got to watch in case the standard goes down."

But even in the short time Gourevitch has been editor, he's discovered a few writers he is convinced we will hear lots more of, people who might previously have been published only in small college magazines or whose work has never been translated into English. "Finding new fiction is incredibly gratifying," he says. "It's right at the core of what we do."

As we talk, proofs of the new edition arrive on his desk. "There's an interview with Javier Marias, an extract from a new novel by Joseph Heller no-one knew anything about, some French medieval poems about eating mustard ... It's a lot of fun, this job."

Writers' hints

Joan Didion: I have never written a novel without rereading Conrad's Victory - it opens up all the possibilities. In the same way John and I always prepared for writing a movie by watching The Third Man. It's perfectly told.

James M Cain: If your writing is too easy, you have to worry; if you're not lying awake at night worrying about it.

Truman Capote: The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of a story is just this: after reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final?

Ernest Hemingway: The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all the great writers have had it.