The Creative Impulse

How do you make something out of nothing? One Plus One Equals Three goes straight to the heart of the creative impulse. Combining Dave Trott's disctinctive, almost Zen-like storytelling, humour and practical advice, its collection of provocative anecdotes and thought experiments are designed to light a fire under your own creative ambitions.

I bought this book not because of any great interest in Tennessee Williams or his work, but because of my huge esteem for John Lahr as a critic. And having now fallen into the world of Tennessee Williams, I find myself, somewhat to my surprise, hugely interested in it. What Lahr has done with this book is to make Williams come fully alive, as if in flesh and blood - I don't know that I've ever read a biography that has accomplished this improbable feat so skillfully.

The Gardens of Desire is at once a model of literary interpretation and a groundbreaking psychocritical reading of a literary masterpiece, Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past). Shedding new light on the origins of the creative impulse in general, and on the psychological origins of the Recherche in particular, the book illuminates the hidden associations between matricidal, suicidal, sadistic, masochistic, homoerotic, and creative impulses as manifested in Proust’s work. The book moves beyond traditional Freudian readings of Proust to consider the theories of Otto Rank, Jacques Derrida, and others, and provides provocative readings of the "privileged moments" that comprise many of the work’s "critical cruxes," as well as a thought-provoking rereading of the novel’s ending. Both elegant and accessible, this book boldly explores the violence of desire as it relates not only to Proust’s narrator, but also to Proustian criticism itself, with its own violent desire to appropriate the essence of Proust’s masterpiece.