edited by Charles Baxter & Peter Turchi
University of Michigan Press, 2001

Essays by Richard Russo, Jim Shepard, Susan Neville, Steven Schwartz, Chuck Wachtel, Joan Silber, Ehud Havazelet, Charles Baxter, Debra Spark, Karen Brennan, Robert Boswell, C.J. Hribal, Peter Turchi, Antonya Nelson, Michael Martone, Kevin McIlvoy, Pablo Medina, Judith Grossman, Margot Livesey

In Bringing the Devil to His Knees, nineteen award-winning writers--all expert teachers--share the secrets of creating compelling stories and novels. A combination handbook, writer's companion, and collection of spirited personal essays, the book is filled with specific examples, hard-won wisdom, and compassionate guidance for both the developing and the experienced fiction writer.

Originally delivered as talks in the writing classes at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, one of the most highly respected writing programs in the country, these imaginative essays are rich with masterful examples, personal anecdotes, and hard-earned insights. Practicing writers--and readers--of fiction will find in these pages a number of surprising and original approaches to the writer's work by award-winning practitioners adept at teaching others what they know.

CHARLES BAXTER is author of several works of fiction, including The Feast of Love (nominated for the National Book Award), Shadow Play, First Light, Believers, and A Relative Stranger. He teaches writing at the University of Michigan and in the low-residency MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

PETER TURCHI is author of the novel The Girls Next Door, a collection of stories, Magician, and two books of nonfiction, The Pirate Prince and Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press. He is Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

WHAT AUTHORS ARE SAYING ABOUT BRINGING THE DEVIL TO HIS KNEES:

"I've been greatly instructed by these brilliant essays, many of which I first heard as lectures by my fellow faculty members un the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Now, happily, writers everywhere can profit from these essential and inspiring words."
--Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever.

"Bringing the Devil to His Knees brings to the reader exactly the right mix of wisdom and humilty. The solutions these writers offer to the problems of craft and presentation are hard-earned, and it is the difficult cost of their knowledge, and the clarity with which they explain it, that makes this such an important and helpful book. It's less How To than What if?, which seems to me the wisest and most practical tact for a book of this sort to take. I would put it on my craft--"Flaubert's Letters and Madame Bovery itself."
--Michael Parker, author of Towns without Rivers.