In this much-anticipated memoir, Metcalf takes us on a personal journey through his life and those influences that inform his own literary aesthetic. Here is a fascinating story peopled with the likes of Alice Munro, Norman Levine, Ernest Hemingway, John Newlove, Hugh Hood, Keath Fraser, Irving Layton, Mavis Gallant, and many other literary luminaries. By turns humorous and iconoclastic and brimming with intelligence and brio, this highly readable memoir provides much-needed perspective on the art of editing, literary values, and the current state of Canadian literary publishing.