Illuminations: Great Writers on Writing [Paperback]

Christina Davis (Author, Editor), Christopher Edgar (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2003

Illuminations is a dazzling behind-the-scenes look at the art of writing, with 55 thought-provoking passages on the nature of audience, the search for subject, the defense of poetry, the benefits of studying form, the equilibrium between art and life, the nexus between politics and prose, and much more. Each passage is accompanied by a stunning (and seldom seen) image of the author. Writers, teachers, and lovers of literature will revel in this collection of great writers from around the world and throughout history, including Dante, Boccaccio, Michel de Montaigne, Sei Shonagon, Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, Marina Tsvetaeva, Jorge Luis Borges, Edith Wharton, John Keats, Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel García Márquez, Ernest Hemingway, George Eliot, Marguerite Duras, Italo Calvino, George Orwell, Wallace Stevens, Sylvia Plath, Fernando Pessoa, W. B. Yeats, Joseph Conrad, William Carlos Williams, Leo Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf, and Marianne Moore. Includes a complete list of sources.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The quotations are not mere epigrams....They provoke thought. They stretch mind and soul....A lively, essential conversation. --The Bloomsbury Review, Jan-Feb 2004

About the Author

Christina Davis's poems and articles have appeared in Paris Review, New Republic, Boston Review, and Poets & Writers. She is the recipient of several fellowships and residencies at Yaddo and the Vermont Studio Center. She is Editor at Teachers & Writers Collaborative.

Christopher Edgar is the author of At Port Royal, a collection of poems, and the translator of Tolstoy as Teacher: Leo Tolstoy's Writings on Education. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2000 and 2001. He is Publications Director at Teachers & Writers Collaborative.

Product Details

• Paperback: 117 pages
• Publisher: Teachers & Writers Collaborative (September 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0915924684
• ISBN-13: 978-0915924684
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 6.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,294,417 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Inspiration and Illumination from the Source, September 18, 2005

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Illuminations: Great Writers on Writing (Paperback)

The joy of reading is finding words that express our joys, our fears, our anxieties, our longings, and our quest for portals of exit from the world, if even for ony the short time spent between the two covers of a book. How often have we closed a book and wondered in awe just how the creators of that writing arrived at the inspiration and the choice of subject and manner of expression, and the ability to engage our attention and minds and fantasies?

'ILLUMINATIONS: Great Writers on Writing' provides one of the most fascinating surveys of a wide variety of writers' meditations and musings ever published. In a brief 130 pages editors Christina Davis and Christopher Edgar have provided rare photographs and succinct thoughts from 55 writers ranging in time from Dante Alighieri to the present. Some of these writers are known to everyone, others to a smaller audience, yet each of them has enlightening statements about the art of and reason for writing.

Some of the writers included are Nabokov, Neruda, Hemingway, Borges, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Poe, Rilke, Frank O'Hara, Eudora Welty, Oscar Wilde, Conrad, Calvino, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Faulkner William Carlos Williams - and that is only a sampling. To read personal thoughts by these artists while seeing images of them previously little known to the public is indeed a treasure. Example: Chinua Achebe writes "Given the great gulf between being and knowing, between his essence and existence, man has no choice really but to make and believe in some fiction or other. .... One thing that worries one above all else in the frenetic materialism that pervades our contemporary life is that as a species we may be losing the Open Sesame to the 'mundo' of fiction - that ability to say 'Let's pretend' like grace before our act...and yet to draw from this insubstantial pageant essential insights and wisdom for making our way in the real world".

This is not only an important and fascinating book for all readers, it is a magnum opus for writers at every stage in their careers. Clearly this is one of the most hallowed books released in many years. Highly Recommended. Grady Harp, September 05