Learning how to revise may well be the most excruciating part of writing - frequently it is what makes or breaks new writers. Now, in this unique and highly useful book, Jay Woodruff gives some of America's finest contemporary writers an opportunity to talk with passion and professionalism about revision - about the hard work of their writing. Books on writing generally offer prescriptions and proscriptions about this craft so hard to learn instead of evidence. But in A Piece of Work Woodruff's incisive questions guide five writers - Tobias Wolff, Tess Gallagher, Robert Coles, Joyce Carol...

Robert Coles is a psychiatrist with a novelist's sensibilities. -Of course everything I come up with, - he says, -novelists have known beforehand.-

These twenty-three interviews selected from hundreds that Coles has given disclose not only an illustrious physician trained in pediatrics and psychoanalysis but also a sage whose compassion for children and suffering seems boundless.

In focusing on a man known mainly as an eminent psychiatrist and author of The Spiritual Life of Children and more than fifty other books, this collection is a departure from the other books in the...