This coffee table-sized book, signed by the author/photographer, was a gift from dear friends, and a gift it truly is.

Wilson, an accomplished photographer whose work has appeared in major periodicals and in her previous books about the American West, has given readers a special present, head shots and candids of some of the greatest writers of our time.

Between 2010 and 2022, Wilson photographed 38 writers, most whom I’ve read, but several who I wouldn’t have been able to identify by face.  From Santa Fe to Vienna, Austin, Texas to New York City, Wilson captured these artists of the written word in their homes, gardens, writing studios, city streets, and atop horses, kayaks, and bicycles.  With only a brief paragraph or two to establish the setting, Wilson gives us wonderful portraits of some of the greatest writers of our time—-Marquez and Cormac McCarthy, Seamus Heaney and Jim Harrison,  Coetzee and Coates, McEwan and McGuane, and on and on.

In an excellent introduction, Louise Erdrich, another subject of Wilson’s camera, comments upon “the joy and the loss within these pages” as she reflects on the deaths of Marquez, McMurtry, Fuentes, Heaney, Harrison, and Merwin since these photos were taken.  She concludes her comments in this way: “Do these photographs get at the question every writer is asked a thousand times within a life span—what makes you write these books? These photographs make writers seem suspiciously normal.  Yet something happens when Laura Wilson goes back to her photography studio and we sit down to write.  We tap into the ancient pleasures of storytelling and at the same time take on the human struggle against the obvious.”

I had the pleasure of sitting with this book next to the wood stove in Vermont as a winter storm howled outside the windows.  The couple of hours spent with favorite writers (Cusk, Harrison, Penelope Lively, David McCullough, Ian McEwan, W. S. Merwin, Haruki Murakami, and  Colm Toibin) were special.  This book makes the perfect gift for any reader,