Based on a series of talks pairing writers of note at NYC’s beloved bookstore, Upstairs at the Strand offers candid and behind-the-scenes accounts of the ways leading writers work, think, and live. The book features such celebrated novelists, playwrights, and poets as Martin Amis, Paul Auster, Renata Adler, Charles Simic, Patti Smith, and Mark Strand, as well as contemporary stars such as Hilton Als, Alison Bechdel, Junot Díaz, Rachel Kushner, and Téa Obreht. Here are Díaz and Als riffing on masculinity, Auster telling the story of meeting Samuel Beckett (and Edward Albee responding with an account of his own), Bechdel detailing the differences between writing about her father and writing about her mother, and George Saunders cheerfully describing to Deborah Eisenberg what he calls his “Hemingway boner” and how it prevented him from writing in his own voice.