Why We Write About Ourselves

Author: Meredith Maran
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0142181978
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In the voices of twenty landmark memoirists—including New York Times bestselling authors Cheryl Strayed, Sue Monk Kidd, and Pat Conroy—a definitive text on the craft of autobiographical writing, indispensable for amateur and professional writers alike. For readers of Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir and Judith Barrington’s Writing the Memoir, this follow-up to editor Meredith Maran’s acclaimed writers’ handbook, Why We Write, offers inspiration, encouragement, and pithy, practical advice for bloggers, journal-keepers, aspiring essayists, and memoirists. Curated and edited by Maran, herself an acclaimed author and book critic, these memoirists share the lessons they’ve learned through years of honing their craft. They reveal what drives them to tell their personal stories and examine the nuts and bolts of how they do it. Speaking frankly about issues ranging from turning oneself into an authentic, compelling character to exposing hard truths, these outstanding authors disclose what keeps them going, what gets in their way, and what they love most—and least—about writing about themselves. “It's possible that Why We Write About Ourselves is the first compilation of memoirists at the top of their game seriously and thoughtfully considering the genre.” – LA Times

Why We Write

Author: Meredith Maran
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0452298156
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Book Description
Twenty of America's bestselling authors share tricks, tips, and secrets of the successful writing life. Anyone who's ever sat down to write a novel or even a story knows how exhilarating and heartbreaking writing can be. So what makes writers stick with it? In Why We Write, twenty well-known authors candidly share what keeps them going and what they love most—and least—about their vocation. Contributing authors include: Isabel Allende David Baldacci Jennifer Egan James Frey Sue Grafton Sara Gruen Kathryn Harrison Gish Jen Sebastian Junger Mary Karr Michael Lewis Armistead Maupin Terry McMillan Rick Moody Walter Mosley Susan Orlean Ann Patchett Jodi Picoult Jane Smiley Meg Wolitzer

Why I Write

Author: George Orwell
Publisher: Renard Press Ltd
ISBN: 1913724263
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 15

Book Description
George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

Why We Write About Ourselves

Author: Meredith Maran
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698185323
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Oh Boy, You're Having a Girl

Author: Brian A Klems
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1440545464
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
Rules for Raising Little Girls "As the father of a daughter, I wish I'd read this very funny book sooner, if only to know that it's OK for a grown man to wear a tutu." - Dave Barry "Required reading for any parent who doesn't know pants from leggings." - Dan Zevin, author of Dan Gets a Minivan: Life at the Intersection of Dude and Dad It's easy to imagine how you'd raise a boy--all the golf outings, lawnmower lessons, and Little League championships you'd attend--but playing dad to a little princess may take some education. In Oh Boy, You're Having a Girl, Brian, a father of three girls, shares his tactics for surviving this new and glittery world. From baby dolls and bedtime rituals to potty training and dance recitals, he leads you through all the trials and tribulations you'll face as you're raising your daughter. He'll also show you how to navigate your way through tough situations, like making sure that she doesn't start dating until she's fifty. Complete with commandments for restroom trips and properly participating in a tea party, Oh Boy, You're Having a Girl will brace you for all those hours playing house--and psych you up for the awesomeness of raising a daughter who has you lovingly wrapped around her little finger. "Somehow, Brian Klems has taken one of the most traumatic situations known to a father--having a daughter--and made it into something so completely hilarious you'll laugh until you've got oxygen deprivation!" - W. Bruce Cameron, author of 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter

This Is How

Author: Augusten Burroughs
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250011566
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
If you're fat and fail every diet, if you're thin but can't get thin enough, if you lose your job, if your child dies, if you are diagnosed with cancer, if you always end up with exactly the wrong kind of person, if you always end up alone, if you can't get over the past, if your parents are insane and ruining your life, if you really and truly wish you were dead, if you feel like it's your destiny to be a star, if you believe life has a grudge against you, if you don't want to have sex with your spouse and don't know why, if you feel so ashamed, if you're lost in life. If you have ever wondered, How am I aupposed to survive this? This is How.

How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read

Author: Pierre Bayard
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1596917148
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 129

Book Description
In this delightfully witty, provocative book, literature professor and psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard argues that not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it. (In fact, he says, in certain situations reading the book is the worst thing you could do.) Using examples from such writers as Graham Greene, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne, and Umberto Eco, he describes the varieties of "non-reading"-from books that you've never heard of to books that you've read and forgotten-and offers advice on how to turn a sticky social situation into an occasion for creative brilliance. Practical, funny, and thought-provoking, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read-which became a favorite of readers everywhere in the hardcover edition-is in the end a love letter to books, offering a whole new perspective on how we read and absorb them.

The Situation and the Story

Author: Vivian Gornick
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466819014
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description
A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras. This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid intelligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of nonfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.

Dawson's Fall

Author: Roxana Robinson
Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
ISBN: 0374719756
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
A cinematic Reconstruction-era drama of violence and fraught moral reckoning In Dawson’s Fall, a novel based on the lives of Roxana Robinson’s great-grandparents, we see America at its most fragile, fraught, and malleable. Set in 1889, in Charleston, South Carolina, Robinson’s tale weaves her family’s journal entries and letters with a novelist’s narrative grace, and spans the life of her tragic hero, Frank Dawson, as he attempts to navigate the country’s new political, social, and moral landscape. Dawson, a man of fierce opinions, came to this country as a young Englishman to fight for the Confederacy in a war he understood as a conflict over states’ rights. He later became the editor of the Charleston News and Courier, finding a platform of real influence in the editorial column and emerging as a voice of the New South. With his wife and two children, he tried to lead a life that adhered to his staunch principles: equal rights, rule of law, and nonviolence, unswayed by the caprices of popular opinion. But he couldn’t control the political whims of his readers. As he wrangled diligently in his columns with questions of citizenship, equality, justice, and slavery, his newspaper rapidly lost readership, and he was plagued by financial worries. Nor could Dawson control the whims of the heart: his Swiss governess became embroiled in a tense affair with a drunkard doctor, which threatened to stain his family’s reputation. In the end, Dawson—a man in many ways representative of the country at this time—was felled by the very violence he vehemently opposed.

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

Author: Kiese Laymon
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1982170824
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book A revised collection with thirteen essays, including six new to this edition and seven from the original edition, by the “star in the American literary firmament, with a voice that is courageous, honest, loving, and singularly beautiful” (NPR). Brilliant and uncompromising, piercing and funny, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America is essential reading. This new edition of award-winning author Kiese Laymon’s first work of nonfiction looks inward, drawing heavily on the author and his family’s experiences, while simultaneously examining the world—Mississippi, the South, the United States—that has shaped their lives. With subjects that range from an interview with his mother to reflections on Ole Miss football, Outkast, and the labor of Black women, these thirteen insightful essays highlight Laymon’s profound love of language and his artful rendering of experience, trumpeting why he is “simply one of the most talented writers in America” (New York magazine).