The Making of a Story

Author: Alice LaPlante
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0393337081
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A Los Angeles Times bestseller: wonderfully lucid and illuminating, Alice LaPlante’s guide to writing fiction “recalls Francine Prose’s bestseller, Reading Like a Writer” (Library Journal). The Making of a Story is a fresh and inspiring guide to the basics of creative writing—both fiction and creative nonfiction. Its hands-on, completely accessible approach walks writers through each stage of the creative process, from the initial triggering idea to the revision of the final manuscript. It is unique in combing the three main aspects of creative writing instruction: process (finding inspiration, getting ideas on the page), craft (specific techniques like characterization), and anthology (learning by reading masters of the form). Succinct, clear definitions of basic terms of fiction are accompanied by examples, including excerpts from masterpieces of short fiction and essays as well as contemporary novels. A special highlight is Alice LaPlante's systematic debunking of many of the so-called rules of creative writing. This book is perfect for writers working alone as well as for creative writing classes, both introductory and advanced.

The Art of Fielding

Author: Chad Harbach
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316192163
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 395

Book Description
A disastrous error on the field sends five lives into a tailspin in this widely acclaimed tale about love, life, and baseball, praised by the New York Times as "wonderful...a novel that is every bit as entertaining as it is affecting." Named one of the year's best books by the New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, Bloomberg, Kansas City Star, Richmond Times-Dispatch, and Time Out New York. At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended. Henry's fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love. Owen Dunne, Henry's gay roommate and teammate, becomes caught up in a dangerous affair. Mike Schwartz, the Harpooners' team captain and Henry's best friend, realizes he has guided Henry's career at the expense of his own. And Pella Affenlight, Guert's daughter, returns to Westish after escaping an ill-fated marriage, determined to start a new life. As the season counts down to its climactic final game, these five are forced to confront their deepest hopes, anxieties, and secrets. In the process they forge new bonds, and help one another find their true paths. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, The Art of Fielding is an expansive, warmhearted novel about ambition and its limits, about family and friendship and love, and about commitment -- to oneself and to others. "First novels this complete and consuming come along very, very seldom." --Jonathan Franzen

Bats of the Republic

Author: Zachary Thomas Dodson
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 0385539843
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 471

Book Description
"Archetypes of the cowboy story, tropes drawn from sci-fi, love letters, diaries, confessions all abound in this relentlessly engaging tale. Dodson has quite brilliantly exposed the gears and cogs whirring in the novelist’s imagination. It is a mad and beautiful thing.” --Keith Donohue, The Washington Post Winner of Best of Region for the Southwest in PRINT’s 2016 Regional Design Awards Bats of the Republic is an illuminated novel of adventure, featuring hand-drawn maps and natural history illustrations, subversive pamphlets and science-fictional diagrams, and even a nineteenth-century novel-within-a-novel—an intrigue wrapped in innovative design. In 1843, fragile naturalist Zadock Thomas must leave his beloved in Chicago to deliver a secret letter to an infamous general on the front lines of the war over Texas. The fate of the volatile republic, along with Zadock’s future, depends on his mission. When a cloud of bats leads him off the trail, he happens upon something impossible... Three hundred years later, the world has collapsed and the remnants of humanity cling to a strange society of paranoia. Zeke Thomas has inherited a sealed envelope from his grandfather, an esteemed senator. When that letter goes missing, Zeke engages a fomenting rebellion that could free him—if it doesn’t destroy his relationship, his family legacy, and the entire republic first. As their stories overlap and history itself begins to unravel, a war in time erupts between a lost civilization, a forgotten future, and the chaos of the wild. Bats of the Republic is a masterful novel of adventure and science fiction, of elliptical history and dystopian struggle, and, at its riveting core, of love.

The Making of My Special Hand

Author: Jamee Riggio Heelan
Publisher: Rehabilitation Institute of Ch
ISBN: 9781561451869
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A child who was born with one hand tells the story of how people at the hospital made a helper hand for her, how the new hand operates, how it feels, and how she can use it.

The Stories We Live by

Author: Dan P. McAdams
Publisher: Guilford Press
ISBN: 9781572301887
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Book Description
This book should be value for all those who are interested in enhancing their self-understanding. It should also serve as useful classroom text for undergraduates and advanced students in personality and social psychology, counselling and psychotherapy.

Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece

Author: Michael Gorra
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871403285
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 496

Book Description
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Finalist for National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography) One of the Best Books of 2012: The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, The Millions, Kirkus Reviews, Boston Phoenix A revelatory biography of the American master as told through the lens of his greatest novel. Henry James (1843–1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James’s masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady (1881). Gorra, an eminent literary critic, shows how this novel—the scandalous story of the expatriate American heiress Isabel Archer—came to be written in the first place. Traveling to Florence, Rome, Paris, and England, Gorra sheds new light on James’s family, the European literary circles—George Eliot, Flaubert, Turgenev—in which James made his name, and the psychological forces that enabled him to create this most memorable of female protagonists. Appealing to readers of Menand’s The Metaphysical Club and McCullough’s The Greater Journey, Portrait of a Novel provides a brilliant account of the greatest American novel of expatriate life ever written. It becomes a piercing detective story on its own.

An American in the Making

Author: Marcus Eli Ravage
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Acculturation
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description

The Making of Us

Author: Lisa Jewell
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451609116
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
As a man named Daniel slowly fades away in a London hospice, he tells his friend Maggie that he was an anonymous sperm donor who fathered four children--a revelation that unexpectedly brings together a group of strangers, in this powerful celebration of family, friendship, life, and love.

The Incredible True Story of the Making of the Eve of Destruction

Author: Amy Brashear
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 1616959045
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Book Description
"Though the story takes place in the '80s, it feels eerily timely."—Bustle Arkansas, 1984: The town of Griffin Flat is known for almost nothing other than its nuclear missile silos. MAD—Mutually Assured Destruction—is a fear every local lives with and tries to ignore. Unfortunately that’s impossible now that film moguls have picked Griffin Flat as the location for a new nuclear holocaust movie, aptly titled The Eve of Destruction. When sixteen-year-old Laura Ratliff wins a walk-on role (with a plus-one!) thanks to a radio call-in contest, she is more relieved than excited. Mingling with Hollywood stars on the set of a phony nuclear war is a perfect distraction from being the only child in her real nuclear family—which has also been annihilated. Her parents are divorced, and her mother has recently remarried. Her father, an officer in the Strategic Air Command, is absent . . . except when he phones at odd hours to hint at an impending catastrophe. But isn’t that his job? Laura’s only real friend is her new stepbrother, Terrence. She picks him as her plus-one for the film shoot, enraging her fair-weather friends. But their anger is nothing compared to what happens on set after the scripted nuclear explosion. Because nobody seems to know if a real nuclear bomb has detonated or not.

The Making of Her

Author: Bernadette Jiwa
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593186141
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
An unforgettable debut novel about family secrets, falling apart, and coming together. Dublin 1996. Joan Egan lives an enviable life. She and her husband, Martin, and daughter, Carmel, are thriving in Dublin at the dawn of an economic boom. But everything changes when Joan receives a letter from Emma, the daughter who she and Martin gave up for adoption thirty years before, asking for a life-or-death favor. While Joan grapples with the guilt over giving up her baby long ago, she must confront her present as the cracks in her marriage become impossible to ignore and simmering tension with Carmel boils over. Meanwhile, Carmel and Emma must come to terms with the perceived sins of their mother, to imagine a future for their family before it is too late. Spanning the nineties and the sixties, with Dublin as its backdrop, The Making of Her is the tender and page-turning story of marriage, motherhood, a culture that would not allow a woman to find true happiness—and her journey to finally claim it.