Eschewing hundreds of years

From Time Out Chicago, a nice review by Jonathan Messinger of the anthology Bound to Last:

One of my hands-down, unbreakable, no-foolin’ rules for survival is to do my best to avoid writers writing about writing. It’s fine for instructional purposes, I suppose, but usually the navel-gazing seems so reflexive that I grow wary the universe may implode. The flip side of that is the simple joy of reading a writer you admire write of an author he or she gets down with.

Part of the beauty of this book, too, is the leeway the authors were granted. Ed Park (Personal Days) eschews hundreds of years of literary history to instead extoll the virtues of Gary Gygax’s Dungeon Masters Guide, the handbook to hours of enraptured childhood gaming, written in the style of an RPG manual...