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"Mostly Clancy and Grisham, popular stuff," he says, "but I also found some Ibsen and Tennessee Williams," all of which he read before he stumbled into a new addiction: writing.

Eventually, the essays Stringer wrote for a newspaper written and sold by the homeless attracted the attention of a publisher and led to Stringer's Grand Cenmtral Winter: Stories From the Street. It is a book as much about the redemptive power of writing as it is about being down and out.

When we last wrote about Stringer in August 1998, his book had just bee published. That was only the start of a literary success story. Now it's out in 10 languages and in paperback (Washington Square Press, $12.95).

Stringer, a graphic designer before he fell into drug addiction and homelessness, has stayed clean and has another book out, Like Shaking Hands With God: A Conversation About Writing (Seven Stories Press, $15), in which Stringer and novelist Kurt Vonnegut discuss writing.

The title comes from Stringer's description of writing: "It's a joy of discovery. I kind of would not like to know what I'm doing. I had a lot of fun trying to figure out how I was going to fill up these pages, and then, convinced that I'm not going to figure it out, bingo! something happens. It's like shaking hands with God. It's really a great payoff for the hours you sit around wondering if you can do what you're trying to do."

Stringer is contributing to four anthologies—two on homelessness, one about depression and one on racism—and writing more memoirs on his earlier life. But writing doesn't get easy: "I still fear that I have nothing to say, but if I keep my butt in that chair long enough, I'll get somewhere, even if I don't always know where I'm going."

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began to think of him as a superior version of James Frey (author of the badly written pseudo memoir A Million Little Pieces) with the main difference that Mr. Stringer (1) writes well and (2) his tales about life on Skid Row are true. ... Based on two conversations between two friends with a lot of respect for each other, these guys are smart, they know how to express themselves, and they've been around the block a few times. The book bills itself as "a conversation about writing" and it is that. But it’s more of a conversation about being, but a kind of being that involves writing. For a lot of avid readers, that’s a perfect fit.

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Shaking Hands has a slender profile and a pretty cover. But the only thing slight about these conversations is that they leave the reader wanting more. The book is billed as "a conversation about writing," but it is as much about life as about writing. Neither Vonnegut nor Stringer is interested in holing up in a garret to write. Vonnegut makes any excuse to go out and rub elbows with the folks who laments his happy childhood as "no way for a writer to begin." Stringer panics--while he wrote his first book as if on a high, the next one may emerge from an awareness of Oprah and marketability.

Vonnegut and Stringer are passionate about one another's work, passionate about life, and passionate about writing, but not so much so that they ever, for a moment, lose their sense of irony or humor. In the age of the sound bite, literature can be deemed, on some level, useless. Stringer praises writing, in that context, as "a struggle to preserve our right to be not so practical." And Vonnegut? "We are here on Earth to fart around," he proclaims in Timequake (excerpted here). "Don't let anybody tell you any different!"