Imaginative Pursuits: An Artist's Notebook invites readers into film director Paula Markovitch's most intimate creative world. In these pages - memories, reflections, short stories, and fragments - she moves fluidly between childhood recollections, moments from youth, and fictional episodes that often feel more vivid than conscious experience. The book can be read as autofiction, as the memoir of an artist, or as a kind of travel diary.Readers encounter both the author's e...

The Nobel Prize–winning author's classic on the craft of novel writing "distills [the great works] brilliantly, revealing an architecture to their greatness" ( The W ashington Post Book World).In Letters to a Young Novelist, Mario Vargas Llosa condenses a lifetime of writing, reading, and thought into an essential manual for aspiring writers. Drawing on the stories and novels of writers from around the globe—including Borges, Bierce, Célin...

Millions of people around the world communicate better thanks to Mignon Fogarty, aka Grammar Girl, whose top-rated weekly grammar podcast has been downloaded more than 30 million times. Now she's turning her attention to improving our vocabulary—one word at a time—with Grammar Girl's 101 Words Every High School Graduate Needs to Know.Not sure whether your post-high school vocabulary is up to snuff? This handy reference guide is a great starting point for ensuring you know ...

Drawing on 30 years of BOMB Magazine, this anthology of interviews brings together some of the greatest figures of world literature for a brilliant and unforgettable collection of sharp, insightful and intimate author conversations.Here we have a conversation with Jonathan Franzen, still an unknown author, on the eve of the publication of The Corrections; and one with Roberto Bolaño, near the end of his life. Lydia Davis and Francine Prose break d...

I Swear I Saw This records visionary anthropologist Michael Taussig's reflections on the fieldwork notebooks he kept through forty years of travels in Colombia. Taking as a starting point a drawing he made in Medellin in 2006—as well as its caption, "I swear I saw this"—Taussig considers the fieldwork notebook as a type of modernist literature and the place where writers and other creators first work out the imaginative logic of discovery.Notebooks mix the raw material of ...

When we talk about hybrid literary genres, what do we mean? Unprecedented in both its scope and approach, Family Resemblance is the first anthology to explore the answer to that question in depth, providing craft essays and examples of hybrid forms by 43 distinguished authors. In this study of eight hybrid genres—including lyric essay, epistolary, poetic memoir, prose poetry, performative, short-form nonfiction, flash fiction, and pictures made of words

In her elegant yet piercing style, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison interrogates the writer’s task and responsibility in two illuminating and essential pieces. An ebook short.Initially delivered as parts of lecture series and collected in The Source of Self-Regard, these pieces exhibit the depth with which Morrison probes the capacity and power of literature.

From the four-time Nebula Award–winning author, an indispensable work of science fiction criticism, revised and expanded.Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw appeared originally in 1977, and is now long out of print and hard to find. The impact of its demonstration that science fiction was a special language, rather than just gadgets and green-skinned aliens, began reverberations still felt in science fiction criticism. This edition includes two new essa...

So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of How to Read Literature Like a Professor tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Thomas C. Foster's book.Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.This summary of How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster includes:Historical contextChapter-b...

Who is really controlling the pen?Editor Daniel Halpern was profoundly curious about the creative process—so he asked fifty-five world-renowned writers to briefly muse on "the fictional persona behind the scenes," the alter(ed) ego who takes over when there is true literary work to be done. And the writers responded in a myriad of ways. Margaret Atwood, Frank Conroy, William Gass, Czeslaw Milosz, Susan Sontag, James Michener, Joyce Carol Oates, and others offered snap-shot reflecti...

Unlock the more straightforward side of The Ice People with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!This engaging summary presents an analysis of The Ice People by René Barjavel, which is one of the first French science-fiction novels. It tells the story of a discovery into the past of mankind that could very well change its future. From a lost civilization to a tragic love story, this novel has appealed to a broad readership since its pu...

A Comics Studies Reader offers the best of the new comics scholarship in nearly thirty essays on a wide variety of such comics forms as gag cartoons, editorial cartoons, comic strips, comic books, manga, and graphic novels.The anthology covers the pioneering work of Rodolphe Töpffer, the Disney comics of Carl Barks, and the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware, as well as Peanuts, romance comics, and superheroes. It explores the stylistic achievements o...