Life and Work: Writers, Readers, and the Conversations Between Them

In this collection, Tim Parks depicts the dynamic relationships between authors, their work, and their readers, exploring the underlying values and patterns that guide authors in both their writing and their lives. In a wide-ranging series of chapters, he reveals how style and content in a novel reflect a whole pattern of communication and positioning in the author's ordinary and daily behavior. We see how life and work are deeply enmeshed in the work of writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, Feodor Dostoevsky, James Joyce, Anton Chekhov, Philip Roth, Julian Barnes, Peter Stamm, and Geoff Dyer, among others. Parks further shows us how readers' reactions to these writers and their works are inevitably connected to these communicative patterns, establishing a relationship that goes beyond aesthetic appreciation. This collection seeks to show with clarity how, through reading novels, readers' lives inevitably become entangled with authors' lives.