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Illuminations: Great Writers on Writing

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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