"Nobody knows how to write a book" could signal the most ironic call to arms for a craft book ever penned. As an opening line, it might be right up there with the off-hand "All this happened, more or less," the nonfiction kickoff to a chameleonic twentieth-century novel (Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five). This advice-eschewing book on storytelling, A Long Game: How to Write Fiction by Elizabeth McCracken, nonetheless beckons me from the pages of The Guardian newspaper, where I read a review a few days ago. This from the same McCracken who wrote An Exact Replica Of A Figment Of My Imagination, a remarkable 2008 memoir. That poignant autobiographical take on motherhood surfaces for me like a haunted mirror draped in cotton candy-thin cobwebs, circa 1991 (IYKYK). A twenty-first century Le Guin, she steers writers away from cheerleadery cop-outs that urge everyone can be a writer if they only toe the line(s). Quite simply, it's not that easy, especially hewing to the usual nostrums. And in The Long Game, McCracken "is naughty, perverse, quietly exhibitionist and bracingly unashamed." So says Toby Litt of The Guardian. "Writing is a form of sustained mischievous truancy. It’s not about being good," Litt writes of PEN New England-winner McCracken. And so, I'm keen to push, Sisyphus-style, McCracken's latest-and-greatest from my TBR pile into my TBL (to be lived), that boat-rockin' place where 'well-behaved women rarely make history.' Good trouble, here I come!