The Practice of Writing

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.

English author, literary critic, and Birmingham professor David Lodge has given us a thoughtful collection of essays on writing, serving as an end-of-century bookend for E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel. But given the particular century in which Lodge writes, he doesn't stop with prose but also considers stage and television work--he adapted Martin Chuzzlewit for the BBC-- giving the book its greatest strength. Lodge's range runs from academic musings to television scripts, a breadth worthy of any scribe here on the disparate, millennial cusp.