Illuminations: Great Writers on Writing

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.