Invisible Ink: Envy, Jealousy, and the Torments of Creativity of Great Writers

The novelist and creative writing teacher Javier Peña has studied the lives of hundreds of great writers and tells little-known stories: funny, sad, happy, shameful, and unseemly. Here you will meet Leo Tolstoy and Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka and Isaac Asimov, Margaret Atwood and José Saramago, Susan Sontag and Charles Dickens, and many others. You will see your favorite authors from a new perspective, learn about their secrets, passions, hopes, and failures. Biographical facts intertwine with the author's personal experience: the exploration of the literary creative process is combined with his own memories, balancing on the edge between popular science essay and candid, deeply moving memoirs. Javier Peña teaches finding solace in literature even in the hardest of times: he proves that for the sake of happy moments of reading, it is worth living, and that invented stories possess immense power and genuine beauty.