Blaise is a North American treasure, one of a handful of the truly important short-story writers in the last fifty years. His "Selected Essays" bring together for the first time another aspect of his tremendous and courageous oeuvre, belles-lettres, essays and occasional pieces which range over autobiography, his French-Canadian heritage, the craft of fiction, American fiction, Australian fiction, and the work of such individual writers as Jack Kerouac, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, and Bernard Malamud, his friend and mentor. His essays on literary craft and technique are essential reading for aspiring writers and for readers eager for knowledge of literature's nuts and bolts. Always elegant, profound, thought-provoking and contrarian, Blaise's essays grapple with the themes and preoccupations that have animated his fiction, and give us a more intimate understanding of the work of this most modern of North American writers.