A writer’s vision in the fullest sense comes through in the writing, but what is that person actually looking at while setting down words? In these brief essays, accompanied by pen-and-ink drawings, fifty writers, plus one artist, Matteo Pericoli, send postcards from their desks. Windows on the World (Penguin Press, $27.95) not only provides glimpses from Beijing high-rises, Melbourne suburbs, and Nottingham gardens, but offers ample proof that not all writers live in Brooklyn. And while all inhabit the land of imagination, they find their best work hails from the border between the world they look out on and the one they struggle to convey from within. Just as Pericoli’s beautiful drawings demonstrate the flexibility of unadorned lines to be spare or lush as the scene requires, these pieces are at once straightforward descriptions of everyday work habits and eloquent statements about creativity. For Emma Larkin in Burma as for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Lagos, a glance outside is inspiration, “a view choked with stories.” Looking out on Skopjce, Lidija Dimkovska finds “it was impossible not to write.” For others, the window is a rest; Marina Endicott uses it as “a way for my mind to blink.” T.C. Boyle looks out at Montecito and finds “distraction and lack of distraction both.”