"The Exuberant Self" The Elegant Variation
"Driving the Stake" Guernica
"Heal the Lung" Guernica
"Kafka?  I Love Kafka.  He's Very Kafkaesque" Guernica
"The Disciplined Soul" InDigest
"Metaphor Will Save Your Life" Tin House Blog
"Ten Favorite Books of Creative Criticism" Conversational Reading
"The Poetry Lesson, by Andrei Codrescu" Quarterly Conversation

The Story About the Story

Writers and critics have always approached writing about reading differently.  Most of us are familiar with the latter group: the theoretical critical enterprise that has resulted in the five-paragraph essay with which all high school students are inoculated against the effects of good books.  The Story About the Story suggests an alternative: the writers' methodology.  Writers have always approached writing about reading from an intensely personal perspective, incorporating their pasts and their passions into their process of interpretation.  Never before collected in a single volume, the many essays compiled here suggests an unidentified school of "creative criticism," and a possible future for how we write about reading.

The Story About the Story offers lessons from a remarkable range of celebrated authors that amount to an invaluable course on both how to write and read well.  These essays are by turns poignant, smart, suggestive, intellectual, funny, sassy, scathing, laudatory, wistful, and hopeful -- and above all deeply engaged in what Emerson called “creative reading.”

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