The Story I Am
Mad About the Writing Life
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
"This is a gorgeous book, one that will inspire anyone to make the next sentence."—Jericho Brown, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 2020
"A hymn of praise for the craft of weaving words in order to survive."—Kitty Kelley
Roger Rosenblatt has always been “mad about the writing life.” In this new collection, he shares the stories and insights about writing that have inspired him, as a journalist, a columnist for The Washington Post, an essayist for Time magazine and The New Republic, and then as the author of best-selling books like Making Toast, Rules for Aging, Kayak Morning, and Unless It Moves the Human Heart. The new and beloved pieces in The Story I Am: Mad About the Writing Life, drawn from his vast body of work, celebrate the art, the craft, and the soul of writing.
Here are essays and excerpts on the rewards and punishments of the life of a writer, along with thoughts on how to write, what to write, and why writing lies at the heart of human hope and experience. Reviewing Rosenblatt’s memoir The Boy Detective in the New York Times Book Review, Pete Hamill said Rosenblatt “writes the way a great jazz musician plays, moving from one emotion to another.” For Rosenblatt, writing, like jazz, is the art of improvisation. Rosenblatt writes that “Writing makes justice desirable, evil intelligible, grief endurable, and love possible.” In a nutshell, it’s worth a life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rosenblatt (Lapham Rising) scoured through his back catalog to produce this delightful collection of short pieces, which include excerpts from his novels and memoirs (some previously unpublished) and selections of his essays for Time, the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, and other publications. Though Rosenblatt writes of his desire to avoid obvious connections, thematic links nonetheless emerge. Foremost among these is Rosenblatt's fascination with writing, in all its forms. In going through his work of over 40 years, he writes, he found a unity of "tone and mood" "as though I had been playing a few notes of music at a time, scattered over a great many years, and then heard all the disparate parts coalesce into one recognizable tune." He conveys his appreciation of "the writer's life" through anecdotes from his teaching, appraisals of other writers, and descriptions of the process of capturing thought in language. The brevity of the excerpts makes the book challenging to read cover to cover, but readers who dip in for short visits will be rewarded. By turns funny, acerbic, and wistful, this collection will provide Rosenblatt's many fans with much to delight them.
