A young man writes letters in the voice of his dead father. A young woman is shot at by a hunter in the field. An early-twentieth-century idyll is destroyed by infidelity. A schoolgirl dies in an exploding car. These are the tense, poignant stories of E. L. Doctorow's Lives of the Poets, as full of mystery and meaning as any of the longer works by this American master. Then comes the astonishing title novella, in which the images and themes of the stories are interwoven with their fictive author's unsparing confessions as he chronicles the actual urban life around him. In this brilliant, funny, and painful story of the stories, the writer's impassioned, memory-ridden mind is given to our contemplation, granting us a rare look at the creative process and its connection to the heart.

"Better than any fiction I know, Lives of the Poets illuminates the sources from which fiction springs."---Newsweek

"Doctorow is an impeccable stylist, a man who writes with exceptional clarity and precision."---Publishers Weekly

"Invaluable ... Doctorow's subtlest work of fiction."---The New York Times Book Review