This is an inspiring book about writing and - more unusually - a book that honors ambition. Upton explores forces that threaten our ability to fulfill the most daring aspirations, and she examines ambition's adjuncts, including failure, boredom, and purity, offering a provocative antidote: obsession. In the process, Upton argues for a new perception of literary art as "a good secret" at a time when our interior lives and our imaginations are under threat. Novelist Brock Clarke says, "This is a book about why literature matters and] it's an example of why literature matters. The best, most...

This is an excellent book about writing and-more unusually-a book that honors ambition, that idiosyncratic drive that compels writers and other artists to action and then keeps them going, despite every kind of obstacle. In a linked series of essays, Lee Upton reclaims ambition as an essential value, describing its roles (as subject, and as motivation) in truly great writing. Upton explores forces that threaten our ability to fulfill the most daring aspirations, and she examines ambition's adjuncts, including failure, boredom, and purity, offering a provocative antidote: obsession. One...

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2014

Best New Fiction of May 2014, Typographical Era

Alternately chilling, funny, devastating, and hopeful, these 17 stories introduce us to a theater critic who winds up in a hot tub with the actress he routinely savages in reviews; a biographer who struggles to discover why a novelist stopped writing; a student who contends with her predatory professor; and the startling scenario of the last satyr meeting his last woman.

Writer-in-residence and a professor of English at Lafayette College, Lee Upton is author of...