"To hold this range of beliefs in the palm of your hand is as fine, as grounding, as it was hearing them first on the radio. Heartfelt, deeply cherished beliefs, doctrines for living (yet none of them doctrinaire). Ideas and ideals that nourish. You can see it in their faces, in the photos in this book. And read it in their words. I'm so proud that NPR helped carry this Edward R. Murrow tradition into a new century. And so glad to have it in print, to encounter again and again."—Susan Stamberg, special correspondent, National Public Radio

"In the second collection derived from the extraordinarily popular and influential National Public Radio program This I Believe, pithy, personal, and stealthily affecting essays grapple with life's big questions from myriad perspectives and with refreshingly positive energy . . . Infused with gratitude and hope, these declarations are at once grounding and uplifting."—Booklist

"[Auster] has assembled his youthful [nonfiction] in one stout, handsome silo . . . Seeing the pieces together, you realize they are the work that allowed Auster to see himself as a Writer with a capital 'W.' It's rare these days for a novelist to admit to this desire without mocking it, which explains why Auster has remained the drug of choice for readers who once would have chosen Vonnegut. He read, he wrote, and he hungered. Collected Prose would feel like a tombstone to that time if [Auster] didn't do these things so fervently still."—John Freeman, Dallas Morning News

"Barthes's most popular and unusual performance as a writer is A Lover's Discourse, a writing out of the discourse of love. This language—primarily the complaints and reflections of the lover when alone, not exchanges of a lover with his or her partner—is unfashionable. Thought it is spoken by millions of people, diffused in our popular romances and television programs as well as in serious literature, there is no institution that explores, maintains, modifies, judges, repeats, and otherwise assumes responsibility for this discourse . . . Writing out the figures of a neglected discourse, Barthes surprises us in A Lover's Discourse by making love, in its most absurd and sentimental forms, an object of interest."—Jonathan Culler

"This is a great book—flawed, impossible, infuriating, and moving . . . but he has accomplished in this extraordinary book something finer than mere polemic. En route to his last painful discovery, Barthes takes the reader on an exquisitely rendered, lyrical journey into the heart of his own life and the medium he came to love, a medium that flirts constantly with the 'intractable reality' of the human condition."—Douglas Davis, Newsweek

"Highly original, extremely fertile and inventive, [Barthes] really does represent, in a peculiarly qualified way, a new kind of writing, and he continually discovers new ways or writing about writing . . . It is a remarkable book."—Frank Kermode, The New York Times Book Review

“The seven essays here are expansive, wide-ranging, almost impossible to categorize, merging criticism and personal experience, scholarship and life. Although bounded by the author’s devotion to Russian literature, The Possessed is really a kind of autobiography in reading, in which the characters are Tolstoy, Isaac Babel and Pushkin.”—David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

"Think of subtext in fiction as water; its characters, swimmers on the surface. Like water, subtext is everywhere, ubiquitous and buoyant, darker in its depths, the stuff of immersion. The beauty of Baxter's inaugural entry in Graywolf's . . . 'Art of' series, which draws on examples in literature to instruct on the writing craft, is that it doesn't assume to try and capture the whole of subtext . . . Instead, it focuses on very specific qualities composing it: the art of staging in a story, the importance of inflection in dialog, the ambiguity of motivation. To make the often translucent substance more visible, Baxter highlights excerpts from a wide range of fiction, from the contemporaneous and familiar to the foreign and esoteric . . . Baxter's book will help readers read more creatively and writers to float their stories . . . Highly recommended for all academic libraries."—Maria Kochis, Library Journal