This is the first anthology and guide to the creative possibilities of critical writing. 'We murder to dissect' writes Wordsworth. It's a sentiment shared by many lovers of literature and art, as well as by artists and writers themselves. Too often academic critical writing seems to annihilate what it analyses. Too often, it brings pre-packaged language to bear on works whose whole essence and aim is to change the ways in which we see and describe our world. How, then, to write criticism? Creative-Critical Writing: An Anthology and Guide gathers together, for the first time, writers who strive to find answers to this dilemma. Including works by creative critics as different from one another as Anne Carson and Jacques Derrida, Geoff Dyer and Helene Cixous, it celebrates writing whose formal and intellectual inventiveness is inseparable from a deep fidelity to the writing, art or music it addresses. The Reader offers at once a guide and a goad for all students and teachers and critics of literature and creative writing. It offers a thorough introduction to the theory and practice of creative-critical writing. It is an anthology of innovative and inventive work from some of the most influential writer-critics of the past thirty years.