Description:
Both a sense of urgency and a goodly amount of patience are required for any writer to produce a novel. Moving between these two poles, Jean-Philippe Toussaint here collects a series of short essays on the art of writing, both his own and that of writers he's admired, for example Kafka, Beckett, Dostoyevsky, and Proust. As Toussaint himself has said, "It's only natural for writers... to say a word about how they write and what they owe to great authors."
Brief description: A graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Edward Gauvin was a 2007 fellow at the American Literary Translators Association conference, and received a residency from the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. His translations of Chateaureynaud have appeared in Conjunctions, AGNI, Words Without Borders, Epiphany, The Cafe Irreal, and Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Review Quotes:
"I particularly recommend Urgency and Patience to everyone who dreams of writing, or starting out in the business. Really? Yes, because the novelist here reveals his methodology, his rules, tricks, mannerisms, constraints... and, as reading is inseparable from writing, his experiences as a reader..."--Le Journal du Dimanche