On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove--to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering, pregnant wife--"that the hours of his life belong to himself alone." In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, a Little Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child....

"Wang Er, whose long affair with Chen Qinyang has attracted the attention of local authorities, is shamed and forced to write a confession of his crimes. Instead, he takes it upon himself to write a modernist literary tract. Later, as a lecturer at a chaotic, newly built university, Wang Er navigates the bureaucratic maze of 1980's China, boldly writing about the Cultural Revolution's impact on his life and those around him. Finally, alone and humbled,...

In the throes of the Second World War, young Meissner, a college student with dreams of becoming a scientist, is drafted into the German army and sent to the Eastern Front. But soon his regiment collapses in the face of the onslaught of the Red Army, hell-bent on revenge in its race to Berlin. Many decades later, now an old man reckoning with his past, Meissner pens a letter to his grandson explaining his actions, his guilt as a Nazi participator,...

"Persona writing, a method of borrowing the voice and temperament of accomplished writers, offers aspiring writers imaginative distance and perspective needed to tell their stories. Through a candid and generous account of his own story, acclaimed poet Philip Schultz reveals how his early struggle to find inspiration in his negative inclinations led to the idea of persona writing, the philosophy on which he founded the Writers Studio in 1987. Schultz...