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| Harry Bruce has been pleasing and infuriating readers of national magazines and newspapers in Canada for half a century. The Concise Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature calls him "an essayist of great charm and perception," and now, in his 14th book - Page Fright: Foibles and Fetishes of Famous Writers - he brings all that charm and perception, as well as passion, to the creation of something that's been simmering in various corners of his mind throughout his entire life as a writer. |
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“Page Fright tells more about the creative process than a dozen
academic textbooks, and makes for delightful browsing.”
– Edward O. Wilson, biologist, conservationist, Pulitzer Prize winner |
“This is a splendid feast of literary lore, wonderfully readable and quite amazingly
comprehensive.
Chronicling the physical act of writing, from the age of papyrus scrolls
to the world of computers, Harry Bruce focuses on the endearing quirks and bizarre
obsessions that are part of the profession of literature. He’s written a book for every writer,
and for any reader who ever dreamt of becoming one.”
– Robert Fulford, Canada’s foremost cultural critic
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Page Fright reveals that Charles Dickens dashed off 4,000 words a day with goose quills; Edith Wharton juggled inkpot, pen, scissors, paste and writing board as she worked in bed beside her dog; Henry James demanded on his deathbed to hear someone banging away on his beloved Remington; the sickly asthmatic Marcel Proust wrote Remembrance of Things Past while lying in a cork-lined, soundproof room that stank of fumigations; Philip Roth paced around his studio for six months while writing hundreds of pages simply to find the first sentence of a new novel; Ernest Hemingway said, "The first draft of anything is shit"; and Margaret Atwood confessed "Blank pages fill me with terror," but wrote great literature in hotels, trains, ships and an Alabama town that proudly called itself "the per capita murder capital of the U.S." Page Fright, in short, is the book of revelations about writers.
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