Urgency and Patience (Belgian Literature) - Softcover

"I particularly recommend Urgency and Patience to everyone who dreams of writing, or starting out in the business. Really? Yes, because the novelist here reveals his methodology, his rules, tricks, mannerisms, constraints... and, as reading is inseparable from writing, his experiences as a reader..."--Le Journal du Dimanche

Both a sense of urgency and a goodly amount of patience are required for any writer to produce a novel. Moving between these two poles, Jean-Philippe Toussaint here collects a series of short essays on the art of writing, both his own and that of writers he's admired, for example Kafka, Beckett, Dostoyevsky, and Proust. As Toussaint himself has said, "It's only natural for writers... to say a word about how they write and what they owe to great authors."