An invaluable resource for the student of writing, and enlightening in all sorts of ways ... All the contributors are generous and honest, often painfully so, providing plenty of aphorisms you might want to scribble down and stick on your PC.

Sydney Morning Herald

This anthology compiles over thirty essays on the literary life by authors including Julia Alvarez, Walter Benjamin, Edwidge Danticat, Henry James, Ha Jin, Cynthia Ozick, Binyavanga Wainaina, and David Foster Wallace. Readers gain access and insight into the reflections of a diverse range of writers, all of whom share their approach to the craft and their perspectives on the writing life.

Poets & Writers

The superbly literary essays collected here by writer-professors Cohen and Parini vary from classics to the unheralded, from the mid-1500s to 2014, and present an array of perspectives on how writers approach their work that will reward readers and writers seeking inspiration and guidance. … This loaded, diverse, and provocative anthology has something for readers and writers of any ilk.

Booklist

The Writer's Reader is maybe the best literary conference of all times: a witty, wide-ranging conversation between some of the smartest and most thoughtful writers who have ever put pen to page, pitched toward practitioners at every stage in their development. Best of all, for a population rife with introversion and acute social anxiety, one can attend this particular conference gloriously alone.

Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies

A wondrous compendium of essays both well loved and new to me, each of which feels as if it were written in the middle of the night to be tossed in a bottle for another writer not yet born. The words of the improbable fortune papers read: It will be impossible. Keep going. Take heart.

Mona Simpson, author of Casebook

This is an excellent reader for creative writing courses, collecting the key texts of use to writing students both at undergraduate and postgraduate level ... Alongside classic pieces from Henry James, et al, it is nice to see essays from contemporary writers like Zadie Smith and Lydia Davis. The latter's piece on miniature fiction is particularly useful given that flash fictions seem to be a staple of creative writing programmes at many universities. I'd recommend it for any student of writing at any level.

Paul McDonald, University of Wolverhampton, UK