"Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead." Gene Fowler penned this observation, and most writers published and hopeful would agree with him.

Each time a new book hits the market that can help the aspiring writer, this is cause for rejoicing. One of them just might be the tool that puts that hard-working scribbler into print.

This month there are two worth noting: The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner and A Writer's Book of Days: A Spiritual Companion & Lively Muse for the Writing Life by Judy Reeves. Both are worth picking up, for very different reasons.

While each offers practical advice, the Reeves book has holistic insights into the creative process. Let's look at the inspirational first, for many writers need encouragement more than practical advice.

A Writer's Book of Days is a guide of prompts to get you going. Reeves is a cheerleader who writes, I found that it's easier to begin the writing when a prompt is supplied. The book, truly a book of days for writers, contains a writing-practice topic for every day of the year, such as for January 13, After midnight ; December 26, Write about something sacred ; and April 12, Dubious intentions. Many writers have the best intentions upon sitting down, but feel they lack something to write about. Reeves directs that desire to write by offering daily topics daily, and then encouraging the writer to take them wherever their own personal response leads. Just write! Make mistakes who cares when you're practicing your writing? She offers lots of writing tips in an easy-to-use format, and includes many quotes from other writers, including this one from Natalie Goldberg: Don't just put in your time. That is not enough. You have to make a great effort. Be willing to put your whole life on the line when you sit down for writing practice. Developing a writing habit and a writing style is what's important. Not talking about it.

Betsy Lerner's book, The Forest for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers, takes a different approach. She's a veteran editor and publishing insider, and when she writes about the relationship between publishers and writers, the reader feels privileged, as though forbidden secrets were being divulged on how to get published.

She believes that the best editors must work with the writer, not just the writing, much as Maxwell Perkins did with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe. In fact the title of this book, The Forest for the Trees, comes from a Perkins quote as he was writing to Marcia Davenport.

Lerner's book is not a how-to-write book. Instead she offers advice from the all-important editor's perspective on how to finish a project when all looks hopeless, on what to do when your neuroses get in the way, on how to break through a between-projects stall. The first half of the book addresses The Writer, The Writing. It's broken into chapters such as The Ambivalent Writer, The Natural, The Wicked Child, The Self-Promoter, and The Neurotic. The second half of the book deals with the publishing process, including up-to-date answers to the questions that all writers have about the interaction between themselves and publishers and agents. She discusses the recent mergers of publishing conglomerates; online bookselling, downloading books from the Net, and more. Lerner is good because she can see what the writer sees, and moves from there to what the author needs to see. She understands delusion. Her book encourages clear-sightedness when writers deal with publishers.

So, all you writers out there, finish reading about other writers' success, and go to work. One day at a time. Every day. Write. Write. Write.

And read good books about writing.

George Cowmeadow Bauman is the co-owner of Acorn Bookshop in Columbus, Ohio.

From the late 1930s through the early 1960s, Partisan Review was the most influential literary and cultural journal in the United States. The editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, and their circle of writers and critics composed the core of the group often described as the New York intellectuals. Contributors during those years included many of the leading writers of the day from this country and Europe. Among the many writers whose work was published there: T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Marguerite Yourcenar, George Orwell, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Penn Warren, James Baldwin, and Walker Percy.

PR was primarily a men's club, but there were some remarkable women who, through their extraordinary writing and ambition, were able to not only get their work published but also become prominent intellectuals. David Laskin explores the lives and careers of these talented yet different women in Partisans. Laskin focuses on the interconnected lives and careers of Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Hannah Arendt, and, to a lesser extent, on Diana Trilling and Jean Stafford. He also discusses the Southern novelist and short story writer Caroline Gordon, who was not part of this circle, but who, like her husband Allen Tate, had close ties to Northern intellectuals and had a significant influence on a new generation of writers.

The men who were editors, critics, partners, advisers, and husbands of these women included Rahv, Robert Lowell, Edmund Wilson, and Randall Jarrell. Drawing on correspondence, memoirs, and personal recollections, Caskin shows how complex their lives were. He does not romanticize them. They were all, in their way, crazy at times, he notes, mad in every sense but when they were sane they were extraordinarily brilliant, often charming people, most charming of all when they were with each other. They made serious mistakes in judgment, but, Laskin says, they had a zeal and idealism and originality that have all but vanished from the American political scene or migrated to its fanatical fringes. They were often fiercely competitive but they shared a sense of public responsibility.

How were women regarded by this group? In a sense the Rahv set had no women only wives and writers, and if a writer happened to be female, she became one of the boys. Being a wife in that crowd was a fate worse than death. Both women and men writers believed in marriage, but there was a contradiction. The men and women were intellectual peers and companions, but socially, professionally, and emotionally, the men came first. The husbands wrote; the wives did everything else the housekeeping, child rearing, entertaining, nursing, gardening and then wrote. And it never struck any of them to arrange things differently. The women's movement of the '60s changed things. For these women, they had won their first battle without fighting and lost the war without realizing there was one. They managed to get published and become famous, formidable intellectuals without challenging or offending the males who published them . . . But their unintended victory proved to be perishable, personal, bound up as it was with their own gifts, sway, charm, and intimate connections, powers of persuasion. This fascinating group biography gives us a most revealing look into the literary culture of a unique period in history.

Roger Bishop is a regular contributor to BookPage.

Bibliophiles got to read about a subject quite close to home themselves with the 1997 publication of Used and Rare. In it, married authors Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone chronicled their initial adventures and misadventures into the world of book collecting. Along the way, they encountered real-life characters that would make any fiction writer envious, and, through skillful narrative pacing, made reading about the hunt for musty secondhand tomes engrossing.

In Slightly Chipped—more of a companion volume than a sequel—the Goldstones actually surpass their first effort on the same subject. Now a bit more experienced, they improve on their story by visiting more of a variety of settings, from a library book sale to a seemingly staid rare book discussion group. The most memorable chapters chronicle an investigation into the almost cultish readers and collectors of mystery books (including a disastrous evening at the Edgar Awards) and their own quest to buy books at Sotheby's Duke and Duchess of Windsor auction.

The Goldstones also delve a bit deeper into the stories about the books and authors behind their purchases, including solid background information on Bram Stoker's Dracula and the various writings of the Bloomsbury group. The inclusion helps you appreciate their desire to own the books, and you can't help but feel involved in their successes and failures or want to read some of the books discussed. The weaknesses in this book are the same as in the first: a tendency toward axe-wielding and sniping at people they don't like; unsolicited reviews of specific bookstores, people, and businesses that may or may not be balanced and deserved; and a strange dwelling on the physical appearances of those the authors seem to consider unattractive.

Regardless, Slightly Chipped, like its predecessor, is a delightful, fresh journey. And even if you couldn't tell the difference between the Kelmscott Chaucer and a modern picture book, Slightly Chipped is a welcome addition to any collection.

Bob Ruggiero is a freelance journalist based in Houston, Texas.