SOURCE: Cummins, Walter. Review of Writers and Their Craft, by Nicholas Delbanco. Studies in Short Fiction 30, no. 1 (winter 1993): 102-03.

In the following review, Cummins asserts that Writers and Their Craft is entertaining, but that it fails to provide new ideas or a fresh perspective on the craft of writing.

This collection, [Writers and Their Craft,] material originally contained in a two-volume issue of Michigan Quarterly Review, is an olio of essays, interviews, memoirs, short statements, stories, and even cartoons that the editors hoped would provide “a kind of road map through [American fiction] of the 1990s, a work whose polyphonic structure represents its subject with high fidelity.” What they have produced is entertaining and frequently illuminating; but it fails to function as a road map. Anyone attempting to follow it for guidance would end up lost in a tangle of conflicting routes. The effect is a version of...