BOOKISH
Anthologies for authors
These two star-studded tomes are worthy additions to your fall reading list.
The Writer’s Reader: Vocation, Preparation, Creation
Edited by Robert Cohen and Jay Parini
Flannery O’Connor. Julia Alvarez. Zadie Smith. Jorge Luis Borges. Italo Calvino. David Foster Wallace.
The table of contents in reads like a Who’s Who of All-Time Writing Greats. And as the subtitle suggests, Middlebury College professors Robert Cohen and Jay Parini’s anthology is divided into three sections: Vocation, Preparation, and Creation. In the first section on vocation, readers can find titles like “My Vocation” from Natalia Ginzburg and “Letter to a Young Gentleman who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art” from Robert Louis Stevenson; in the second, works like Henry Miller’s “Reading in the Toilet” and Ha Jin’s “Deciding to Write in English” speak to preparation; and in the third, essays such as Colm Tóibín’s “Grief” and Virginia Woolf’s “Character in Fiction” cover creation.
