The Practice of Writing - Couverture souple

'These essays, so easy in manner, so well-built and informative, offer a fine blend of creative writing and criticism... The pieces on writers who have meant most to him as a novelist, notably Graham Greene (on whom nobody has written better) and Joyce, are brilliant' Sunday Times

In this absorbing volume, David Lodge turns his incisive critical skills onto his own profession, salutes the great writers who have influenced his work, wonders about the motives of biographers, ponders the merits of creative writing courses, pulls the rug from under certain theoretical critics and throws open the curtains on his own workshop.

'It is refreshing to be reminded that those who teach can also do' Observer

'Mr. Lodge's meditations on Joyce, Nabokov and Kingsley Amis, are indeed small gems, the sort of essays you want to underline and commit to memory' New York Times

Also by David Lodge: [jpegs of Write On; The Art of Fiction]

When it comes to the craft of writing, bestselling novelist David Lodge finds much to celebrate, analyze, and confess. In this absorbing collection of seventeen essays he ponders the work of writers he particularly admires, current and past trends in literary style, and the mechanics of the craft itself. Revealing, enlightening pieces on Graham Greene, James Joyce, Kingsley Amis and Anthony Burgess are interspersed with personal reflections on Lodge's own artistic and technical struggles. His insights into the contemporary world of publishing, and mass culture in general, are both trenchant and refreshing.

As entertaining as it is edifying, this collection of fine writing about writing will prove valuable to students of the art as well as to Lodge's many, loyal readers who wish to know more about his own work.