Writers on Writing, Volume II

"As tempting as it is for a writer to tell secrets, it is even more tempting to tell them in the New York Times. The forms of temptation abound: to join the company of other secret revealers, to get something off your chest, to impart a piece of wisdom that has resisted going into a novel or a poem, to cogently remember a time or an event. For a poet, I imagine there is the temptation to state rather than evoke. For a novelist, there is the temptation to stop dissembling. And so, this collection of Writers on Writing pieces is really a collection of temptations yielded to, a collection of secrets divulged in spite of what might happen . . . How to read this book? . . . Read it like eavesdropping or like twisting the knob on an old radio and tuning in stations from far and wide. Read it like an explorer, then wander among the authors' other works. Most of all, read it in a way that allows the varied voices of the company to come and go, to blend, to harmonize with and to echo one another, because it isn't often that forty-six authors sing in chorus."—From the Introduction by Jane Smiley

"Glimpses into writers and the circumstances that shape them . . . Valuable gleanings."—Kirkus Reviews

"In Jane Smiley's scintillating introduction to the second collection of columns from the exceptional New York Times series Writers on Writing, she piquantly observes that in writing about themselves and their art, writers both indulge the urge to tell secrets and battle the fear of disclosure, and this tension is, indeed, present in the two dozen essays that follow. Yet the overriding feeling is that of deep and abiding pleasure in putting thoughts into words and words onto paper. Here's Diane Ackerman marveling over the confluence of psychotherapy and poetry; Alan Cheuse pondering late bloomer-hood; and Leslie Epstein musing over writer's intuition. Allegra Goodman writes amusingly about outwitting the 'inner critic'; William Kennedy celebrates fiction and the 'metamorphosis of experience'; and Shashi Tharoor puzzles over his quandary as an Indian author writing about India in English. Why write, what about, for whom, and in whose voice are crucial concerns addressed by some of the finest living practitioners of this noble art, and readers will love being privy to their ruminations."—Donna Seaman, Booklist