How do you prepare yourself, all alone, to enter an extraordinary state on an ordinary morning?

In The Writing Life, Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Dillard offers up her own trials in the pursuit of inspiration: the absurdity, the fierce determination and the sacrifices (warm feet; gainful employment; peace of mind). Her perennial guide, which wrestles with the hubris and insanity of the creative process, has been an inspiration and a comfort to writers for nearly forty years.

Dillard writes beautiful, mysterious prose and The Writing Life is as much about living life as it is about writing * * Los Angeles Review of Books * *
A genuine source of pleasure. It's accessible and conversational, funny and heart-breaking and tackles, sometimes directly, often obliquely, those questions of method and purpose that can haunt those who've made the mad decision to dedicate their lives to art * * Irish Times * *
Annie Dillard is a wonderful writer and The Writing Life is full of joys * * New York Times Book Review * *
The Writing Life is a spare volume [ . . . ] that has the power and force of a detonating bomb. A book bursting with metaphors and prose bristling with incident * * Detroit News * *
A small and brilliant guidebook to the landscape of a writer's task . . . Dillard brings the same passion and connective intelligence to this narrative as she has to her other work * * Boston Globe * *
For nonwriters, it is a glimpse into the trials and satisfactions of a life spent with words. For writers, it is a warm conversation with a stimulating and extraordinarily talented colleague * * Chicago Tribune * *

Annie Dillard was born in 1945 in Pennsylvania. She is a much-celebrated poet, novelist and essayist and author of thirteen books, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and has received fellowship grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was awarded the 2014 National Humanities Medal for her work deepening the understanding of the human experience.