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Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful Essays on Writing
Review: "Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them," Elie Wisel noted. How true, isn't it? What a wonderful, priceless reflection on the craft of writing.The New York Times produced a beautiful collections of essay on writing. Inviting literary talents (giants really) like Russell Banks, Updike, Alice Walker, Elie Wiesel, Jamaica Kincaid, David Leavitt, Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow and many more. Annie Proulx's essay on collecting books from yard sales is highly inspiring. Same with Bellow's encouragement for us, the society, to discover the magic of literature once more. WRITERS ON WRITING is for anyone who needs inspiration and guide, and for those interested in the art of writing.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Essays on Writing
Review: "Writers write because they cannot allow the characters that inhabit them to suffocate them," Elie Wisel noted. How true, isn't it? What a wonderful, priceless reflection on the craft of writing. The New York Times produced a beautiful collections of essay on writing. Inviting literary talents (giants really) like Russell Banks, Updike, Alice Walker, Elie Wiesel, Jamaica Kincaid, David Leavitt, Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow and many more. Annie Proulx's essay on collecting books from yard sales is highly inspiring. Same with Bellow's encouragement for us, the society, to discover the magic of literature once more. WRITERS ON WRITING is for anyone who needs inspiration and guide, and for those interested in the art of writing.
Rating:
Summary: Writers as the most individual of individuals
Review: Forty- six writers speak about the life of the writer. They provide a whole host of interesting observations. Vonnegut tells us that he learned from Aristotle that to write comedy one must write about characters the readers feel superior to. And that to write tragedy there must be one character that the readers feel superior to them. Joyce Carol Oates tells about the strange feeling about living in one of the major cities of the world for a sabbatical year, London, and having her heart and mind in Detroit. Bellow tells about the slightly uneasy feeling of the writer before the neighbors who are always wondering what this guy is doing at home. Elie Weisel talks about how Hasidic story formed his imagination and still lives within him. Each of the writers seems to have his own problems, obsessions and methods. It is almost as if they were saying ' Of course all human beings are individuals, but somehow writers are among the most individual of individuals. A good collection.
One point though. In part because the Paris Reviews are longer, and in part I think because there is someone who asks questions about the work of the writer the Paris Review interviews about writing are richer than these.
Rating: 
Summary: Impressive
Review: In this fascinating book, forty-six writers talk about what they do in forty-six voices worth listening to -- serious essays, whimsical essays, stories, confessions. The book does not provide biographies, although the basic facts of the lives of many are well known, such as John Updike, David Mamet, Saul Bellow and others. Writers On Writing might be of interest to those who have read Eleanor Wachtel's More Writers and Company, which includes bigraphical data and compelling interviews with about two dozen writers, including several who contributed essays to Writers On Writing: Carol Shields, Alice Walker, E. L. Doctorow, Louise Eldrich, Jane Smiley, and Jamaica Kincaid.
Rating:
Summary: A lot of talent under one cover
Review: This book is exactly what it promised to be: a compilation of the essays that the New York Times runs on Mondays under the headline "Writers on Writing." If you've been following the series you won't find any surprises. It's just nice to have everything in one place in more permanent form than a stack of newspaper clippings. If you don't read the New York Times you'll find a collection of essays loosely themed around writing and whatever the author decides to tie it to, by a wide spectrum of writers including, as a random sampling, Saul Bellow, Barbara Kingsolver, Elie Wiesel and Scott Turow. Chances are you're going to find some names in there that aren't familiar. One could wish the editor had included a brief bio on each writer, or at least a list of their titles. Even so, it's an engaging collection.
Rating: 
Summary: Not What I Expected, but Useful
Review: This is more of a collection of the details of individual authors' lives than of their writing tactics, lessons learned, or other habits, but it does include all of the above. If nothing else, it shows us that writers, even the ones we recognize the names of, are regular people, all of various backgrounds and brought to the "call of writing" by different means.
The various essays help us beginners to remember that we are not starting out with any less advantage than those that have preceeded us...or beat us to publication. There are also useful excerpts from authors' daily lives, showing us how they battle writers' block or just fit in a personal life with their writing life.
All in all, the book takes more of a literary slant than a very down-to-earth and practical one, but that does vary by the included authors. It would've also been nice to have short bios or publishing histories of the authors listed in the book for those that come across as particularly interesting or are unfamiliar to the individual reader. But, we do have Amazon.com for that info., don't we? :)
Rating: 
Summary: Lacks substance
Review: Very disappointing. The occassional gem (like Jamaica Kincaid's) brought my review up by one star, but by and large these essays read like tossed-off first drafts. Sure the crafting of each piece was tight--these folks are professionals and the Times is no rag. But they lacked profundity, and why bother writing something that says nothing? More to the point, why read it? I wanted more--insight, substance, something, anything--from these authors. It wasn't here, but I found it in the Washington Post's version: "The Writing Life" edited by Maria Arana. At 400+ pages deep, that one's worth the price and time.
Rating:
Summary: Some very worthy essays here
Review: Writers on Writing is a mixed bag of essays, edited by journalist John Darnton, that were originally published in the New York Times. The authors of the forty-some pieces that comprise the volume are all celebrated writers (though I confess I was not familiar with all their bylines), a good many of them household names: Kurt Vonnegut and Alice Hoffman and John Updike and Scott Turow and so on. The authors were charged with writing about, well, writing, and they manage to do so, surprisingly enough, without ever stepping on one another's subject matter: each essayist approaches the topic in a manner peculiar to themselves. Some of the essays, those that had the least to do with the task of writing, left me cold: it is a shame that the collection, which is organized alphabetically by author, begins with a particularly weak contribution. But there are far more worthy essays than not in this volume. Among the most interesting of the lot are Kent Haruf's piece on the peculiar way that some writers, including himself, write, and David Leavitt's fascinating reminiscence of his early insistence on order in the unlikeliest of places: "I didn't like it if there were more songs on one side [of a record] than the other; the songs had to be at least three minutes long, with a title that appeared in neither the first nor the last line. (If the title appeared in both the first and the last line, I would remove the offending album from my shelf.)" Writing, Leavitt explains, was a means for him to impose order on ordinary life. There is, too, a very amusing piece by Ed McBain on crime writing, and David Mamet writes of the joys of genre fiction, and in particular of Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey-Maturin series (now a major motion picture!). Readers should find something to like in these pages, and may indeed discover among them a handful of new authors to add to their shelves.
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