Collecting Thomas Farber's nonfiction on writing and the writing life (including all of Compared to What?), A Lover's Quarrel contains this gifted author's meditation on his vocation. Anatomist, ironist, and moralist, Farber achieves effects of luminous integrity with deceptively simple means. A gift to writers who seek to understand what informs or haunts their metier, A Lover's Quarrel is also for any readers whose lives have been shaped---or saved---by story.
Review: "...an amiable and lively account...Allusive, anecdotal...also admirably unsententious."
---The New York Times"It's like listening to a preternaturally articulate, well-read, and inventive person think aloud...by turns a diary, a reading journal..."
---Phyllis Rose, author of Parallel Lives
"...pieces of verbal lacery stitched together into a balanced, lovely, delicately patterned whole."
---Kirkus Reviews
"...delivered with quick, understated wit; as a shrewd, unsentimental, detached essay on this particular occupation; or as the confession of a maniac, with its eruptions of manic fearfulness and comedy; or as the autobiography of one who has been saved from himself---though this is never quite said---by his craft; and even as a sidelong meditation on the practical meaning of art, seen unpretentiously in the terms of an American life."
---Robert Pinsky, author of History of My Heart
Bio: THOMAS FARBER teaches at the University of California, Berkeley and is the publisher of El Leon Literary Arts.
