For fourteen years, five-time Edgar winner and MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block wrote a monthly column on fiction for Writers Digest magazine. These columns yielded four books regarded as classics: Telling Lies for Fun & Profit, Spider Spin Me a Web, The Liar's Bible...and now The Liar's Companion.
Here are some reviews on Goodreads:
"This recently released treasure from award winning mystery author Lawrence Block is a welcome addition to my bookshelf. ...Block has a gift for casual gems of wisdom that stir my storytelling imagination."
"No subject is off limits for Block. From lofty questions (how do writers get their ideas?) to the mundane (how many pages should you write every day?) to the personal (how often should writers exercise? how should writers budget their money?), the advice is practical, funny, and never boring. I do not have a desire to be an author, but these glimpses into the writing life fascinated me."
While Telling Lies for Fun & Profit and Spider Spin Me a Web group the author's columns by topic, Block scrapped this approach when preparing The Liar's Bible and The Liar's Companion, feeling the material flowed more naturally by simply running the columns in chronological order. As Block has written, "Bible and Companion consist of my later columns, and as such they seem to me the best representation of my views on the subjects at hand. Telling Lies has always been the bestseller, perhaps because it led the way, perhaps because I'd had the good luck to stumble on a particularly good title...but I think it quite likely that Bible and Companion are the better books."