Roger Rosenblatt’s love song to the written word, in a collection of pieces that celebrate the art, craft, and the soul of writing, from someone who has done it joyfully and successfully all his life. Kirkus Reviews noted that he has excelled in every form. Here are essays and excerpts on the rewards and punishments of leading a life as a writer, along with thoughts on how to write, what to write, and why writing lies at the heart of human hope and experience. To the author—whose style and method have often has been compared to that of a jazz musician—writing, like jazz, is the art of improvisation. One hunts for the right word as one hunts for the right note in an effort to discover something surprising, even thrilling, and entirely one’s own. The great satisfaction of the work, the music of the endeavor, comes from sharing these discoveries with others, from telling the world something useful and remarkable about itself. The author believes, “Writing makes justice desirable, evil intelligible, grief endurable, and love possible.” In a nutshell, it’s worth a life.
