The Practice of Writing

First American edition, 1st printing. Bright, clean & tight copy, unread, in AS NEW condition. "In this absorbing volume, acclaimed novelist David Lodge turns his incisive critical skills to his own profession, saluting the eminent practitioners of fiction who have influenced his writing, and explaining how literary and dramatic works are made and the many different factors that come into play in this process. [] The constant theme running through these essays is the mysterious process of creativity. Lodge discusses at length the work of writers he particularly admires--Graham Greene, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Green, Kingsley Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, and Anthony Burgess. He addresses the situation of the contemporary novelist, both aesthetically and institutionally, and describes the pleasures of the novelistic text. In delineating the different techniques required to work on a novel and a screenplay, he draws on the experience of adapting his own Nice Work and Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit for television, bringing a refreshingly expert candor to the problems that arise between the idea and the performance. The essays conclude with revealing extracts from the diary he kept as his play, The Writing Game, made its way to the footlights." [jacket copy] "Lodge, a wry and stylish British novelist and former university professor, has collected a fair sample of his literary criticism and re-formed it into an insightful and surprisingly unified look at the craft of writing. He says flat out that this is not a book of literary theory but an examination of the way writers go about their work. His aim, he writes, is 'to demystify and shed light on the creative process, to explain how literary and dramatic works are made, and to describe the many different factors, not always under the control of the writer, that came into play in the process.' The result is a book that should be required reading in any creative writing class not bogged down in dogma. Although his nonfiction writing style is not as free of its academic roots as he would like to think and his outlook is not as satiric as readers of his novels might expect, here is a collection that is both engaging and useful."--Publishers Weekly. Pristine hardcover w/brilliant corners & crisp edges, a square & tight binding, wrapped in a bright-as-new jacket. Quite presentable.…