The Book

Anyone who thinks all writers dip from the same stewpot should read Carole Burns' Off the Page... That writers don't agree about everything will come as no surprise. That they disagree so fundamentally is oddly reassuring. - C. Michael Curtis, The Atlantic Monthly

Writer Carole Burns has put together an insightful, entertaining book about writing and the writing life, featuring forty-three of our foremost contemporary authors. Reading Off the Page can feel like being at a dinner party with a Pulitzer Prize winner on one side and your favorite detective writer on the other as the third bottle of wine is being opened and everyone is beginning to relax.

In interviews on washingtonpost.com, Burns has gotten to the heart of writing by asking questions such as: Can good sex be written? Martis Amis doesn't think so. Are characters based on people the authors know? Richard Ford says no; Russell Banks says sometimes. Did you ever have doubts about your writing? Absolutely, says Michael Cunningham.

These and other authors-including Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, Marisha Pessl, Walter Mosley, Margot Livesey, and Alice McDermott-talk honestly and forthrightly about the art of fiction.

Addictive reading for beginning to established writers or anyone interested in how writers think.
--Betsy Lerner, author of The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers