The Writer's Reader: Vocation, Preparation, Creation (Paperback)

Introduction I. Vocation Natalia Ginzburg, "My Vocation" Tillie Olsen, "Silences" Robert Louis Stevenson, "Letter to A Young Gentleman Who Proposes To Embrace the Career of Art" Flannery O'Connor, "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" John Berger, "The Storyteller" Danilo Kis, "Advice to a Yong Writer" Jay Parini, "Mentors" Edwidge Danticat, "Create Dangerously" Charles Baxter, "Full of It" Ted Solotaroff, "Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years" Julia Alvarez, "The Older Writer and the Underworld" II. Preparation Roberto Bolano, "Who Would Dare?" Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library" Henry Miller, "Reading In the Toilet" Katherine Anne Porter, "My First Speech" Jorge Luis Borges, "Literary Pleasure" Michel de Montaigne, "Of Books" Ha Jin, "Deciding to Write in English" Georges Perec, "Approaches to What?" Cynthia Ozick, "The Lesson of the Master" III. Creation Donald Barthelme, "Not Knowing" Italo Calvino, "Levels of Reality in Literature" Willa Cather, "The Novel Demeuble" Leonard Michaels, "The Personal and the Individual" Colm Toibin, "Grief" Virginia Woolf, "Character in Fiction" Henry James, "The Art of Fiction" Philip Roth, "Writing American Fiction" Lydia Davis, "Form as a Response to Doubt"* Binavanga Wainaina, "How Not to Write About Africa" Robert Cohen, "Refer Madness" David Foster Wallace, "The Nature of the Fun" Zadie Smith, "Fail Better" Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors