A thought-provoking journey inside the minds of the world s most accomplished storytellers, from Shakespeare to Stephen King NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SPECTATOR   Richard Cohen s book acted as a tonic to me. It didn t make me more Russian, but it fired up my imagination. I have never annotated a book so fiercely. Hilary Mantel There are three rules for writing a novel, Somerset Maugham is said to have said. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are. How then to bring characters to life, find a voice, kill your darlings, or run that most challenging of literary gauntlets, writing a sex scene? What made Nabokov choose the name Lolita? Why did Fitzgerald use firstperson narration in The Great Gatsby ? How did Kerouac, who raged against revision, finally come to revise On the Road ? Veteran editor and author Richard Cohen takes us on an engrossing journey into the lives and minds of the world s greatest writers, from Honoré de Balzac and George Eliot to Virginia Woolf and Zadie Smith with a few mischievous detours to visit Tolstoy along the way. In a scintillating tour d horizon, Cohen lays bare the tricks, motivations, and techniques of the literary greats, revealing their obsessions and flaws and how we can learn from them along the way.