The Best Writing on Writing (v. 1)
A marvelously wide-ranging compendium, and why not, since just  about everything printed has to start out beingwritten. Thus  editor Heffron has license to put together a volume with short, pithy  discourses--this is a great book to travel or take lunch breaks  with--on poetry, playwriting, screenwriting, nonfiction, and the death  ofLouis  L'Amour.  The surprise comes, though, not in pieces by the likes  ofTony  KushnerorWilliam  Kittredge(you know they'll be good) but in previously obscure  gems likeNancy  Mairs'moving essay on "The Literature of Personal  Disaster."