Download or read book The Art of Fiction written by John Gardner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-08-18 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic guide, from the renowned novelist and professor, has helped transform generations of aspiring writers into masterful writers—and will continue to do so for many years to come. John Gardner was almost as famous as a teacher of creative writing as he was for his own works. In this practical, instructive handbook, based on the courses and seminars that he gave, he explains, simply and cogently, the principles and techniques of good writing. Gardner’s lessons, exemplified with detailed excerpts from classic works of literature, sweep across a complete range of topics—from the nature of aesthetics to the shape of a refined sentence. Written with passion, precision, and a deep respect for the art of writing, Gardner’s book serves by turns as a critic, mentor, and friend. Anyone who has ever thought of taking the step from reader to writer should begin here.
Download or read book On Moral Fiction written by John Gardner and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Fearless, illuminating” criticism from a New York Times–bestselling author and legendary teacher, “proving . . . that true art is moral and not trivial” (Los Angeles Times). Novelist John Gardner’s thesis in On Moral Fiction is simple: “True art is by its nature moral.” It is also an audacious statement, as Gardner asserts an inherent value in life and in art. Since the book’s first publication, the passion behind Gardner’s assertion has both provoked and inspired readers. In examining the work of his peers, Gardner analyzes what has gone wrong, in his view, in modern art and literature, and how shortcomings in artistic criticism have contributed to the problem. He develops his argument by showing how artists and critics can reintroduce morality and substance to their work to improve society and cultivate our morality. On Moral Fiction is an essential read in which Gardner presents his thoughtfully developed criteria for the elements he believes are essential to art and its creation. This ebook features an illustrated biography of John Gardner, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Gardner family and the University of Rochester Archives.
Download or read book John Gardner written by Barry Silesky and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2004-02-05 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a decade--from 1973 to 1982--John Gardner was one of America's most famous writers and certainly its most flamboyantly opinionated. His 1973 novel, The Sunlight Dialogues, was on the New York Times bestseller list for fourteen weeks. Once in the limelight, he picked public fights with his peers, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Norman Mailer among them, and wrote five more bestsellers. Gardner's personal life was as chaotic as his writing life was prolific. At twenty, he married his cousin Joan, and after a long marriage that was both passionate and violent, left her for Liz Rosenberg, a student. Only a few years later, he left Rosenberg for another student, Susan Thornton. Famous for disregarding his own safety, he rode his motorcycle at crazy speeds, incurred countless concussions, and once broke both of his arms. He survived what was diagnosed as terminal colon cancer only to resume his prodigious drinking and to die in a motorcycle accident at age forty-nine, a week before his third wedding. Biographer Barry Silesky captures John Gardner's fabulously contradictory genius and his capacity to both dazzle and infuriate. He portrays Gardner as a man of unrestrained energy and blatant contempt for convention and also as a man whose charisma drew students and devoted followers wherever he went. Amazingly, Gardner published twenty-nine books in all, including eleven fiction titles, a book-length epic poem, six books of medieval criticism, and a major biography. Twenty-one years after his death, his On Moral Fiction and The Art Of Fiction are still read and debated in MFA programs across the country. This is a full-scale biography of a writer who was, for ten years, almost bigger than life. It lives up to its subject magnificently.
Download or read book On Writers and Writing written by John Gardner and published by Counterpoint. This book was released on 1995 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A first-time collection of the essays and reviews of the late artist and critic, presenting his views on Bellow, Nabokov, Updike, and others, explores subjects ranging from religion to fairy tales, and from King Arthur to Walt Disney.
Download or read book The Sweetest Fruits written by Monique Truong and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Monique Truong, winner of the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, comes “a sublime, many-voiced novel of voyage and reinvention” (Anthony Marra) "[Truong] imagines the extraordinary lives of three women who loved an extraordinary man [and] creates distinct, engaging voices for these women" (Kirkus Reviews) A Greek woman tells of how she willed herself out of her father's cloistered house, married an Irish officer in the British Army, and came to Ireland with her two-year-old son in 1852, only to be forced to leave without him soon after. An African American woman, born into slavery on a Kentucky plantation, makes her way to Cincinnati after the Civil War to work as a boarding house cook, where in 1872 she meets and marries an up-and-coming newspaper reporter. In Matsue, Japan, in 1891, a former samurai's daughter is introduced to a newly arrived English teacher, and becomes the mother of his four children and his unsung literary collaborator. The lives of writers can often best be understood through the eyes of those who nurtured them and made their work possible. In The Sweetest Fruits, these three women tell the story of their time with Lafcadio Hearn, a globetrotting writer best known for his books about Meiji-era Japan. In their own unorthodox ways, these women are also intrepid travelers and explorers. Their accounts witness Hearn's remarkable life but also seek to witness their own existence and luminous will to live unbounded by gender, race, and the mores of their time. Each is a gifted storyteller with her own precise reason for sharing her story, and together their voices offer a revealing, often contradictory portrait of Hearn. With brilliant sensitivity and an unstinting eye, Truong illuminates the women's tenacity and their struggles in a novel that circumnavigates the globe in the search for love, family, home, and belonging.
Download or read book Grendel written by John Gardner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-06-02 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic and much lauded retelling of Beowulf follows the monster Grendel as he learns about humans and fights the war at the center of the Anglo Saxon classic epic. "An extraordinary achievement."—New York Times The first and most terrifying monster in English literature, from the great early epic Beowulf, tells his own side of the story in this frequently banned book. This is the novel William Gass called "one of the finest of our contemporary fictions."
Download or read book Why We Write written by Meredith Maran and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-01-29 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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
Download or read book The Sunlight Dialogues written by John Gardner and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2006 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vivid, compassionate, and often disturbing, this expansive novel is John Gardner's masterpiece.
Download or read book Mickelsson s Ghosts written by and published by New Directions Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The critically acclaimed final masterwork of John Gardner: an American novel haunted with macabre and cerebral elements.
Download or read book Conversations with John Gardner written by John Gardner and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1990 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection, selected from more than 140 interviews Gardner granted, presents a wealth of information on the life and art of one of America's foremost novelists. These interviews show him as a novelist, a charismatic teacher of creative writing, and a widely published scholar who has vast knowledge and who generated much literary information in his lectures and interviews. After the publication of such popular and critical successes as Grendel (1971) and The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), this philosophical writer with an enviable talent for storytelling was regarded as ""a major contemporary writer."" After Gardner had demonstrated that he was one of America's most prolific, versatile, and imaginative authors, he became one of its most controversial when he attacked the literary establishment in his book On Moral Fiction and in his interviews. These candid conversations reveal a man of contrasts and contradictions, a writer who, as one of his interviewers remarks, ""brought to everything he did a passion that at times bordered on madness.
Download or read book On Leadership written by John Gardner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1993-03-12 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A searching examination of leadership as it is practiced, or malpracticed, in America today. Includes the elements of motivation, shared values, social cohesion, and institutional renewal.
Download or read book Freddy s Book written by John Gardner and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2010-09-21 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIV DIVDIVThe bestselling story of a king’s crusade to vanquish the Devil and to defeat the monster in each of us/divDIV /div/divDIVA visiting lecturer is lured to the remote, gothic mansion of an estranged professor and his only son, who is described as a monster. But soon, the visitor enters an enchanting new world when he begins reading the son’s hidden manuscript. Part history, part myth, the story conjures a sixteenth-century Sweden in which good and evil clash for the ultimate prize. To attain the throne, the protagonist, Gustav Vasa, accepts the Devil’s counsel, but to remain in power and rule justly, he must drive the Devil underground. This sweeping, masterful tale transports us from the wasted mining hills of Dalarna to the frozen northern country of the Lapps—and into the very heart of the struggle over what it means to be human./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features a new illustrated biography of John Gardner, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Gardner family and the University of Rochester Archives./div /div
Download or read book Self Renewal written by John W. Gardner and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2018-02-27 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The only stability possible is stability in motion.”—John William Gardner In his classic treatise Self-Renewal, John W. Gardner examines why great societies thrive and die. He argues that it is dynamism, not decay, that is dramatically altering the landscape of American society. The twentieth century has brought about change more rapidly than any previous era, and with that came advancements, challenges, and often destruction. Gardner cautions that “a society must court the kinds of change that will enrich and strengthen it, rather than the kind of change that will fragment and destroy it.” A society’s ability to renew itself hinges upon its individuals. Gardner reasons that it is the waning of the heart and spirit—not a lack of material might—that threatens American society. Young countries, businesses, and humans have several key commonalities: they are flexible, eager, open, curious, unafraid, and willing to take risks. These conditions lead to success. However, as time passes, so too comes complacency, apathy, and rigidity, causing motivation to plummet. It is at this junction that great civilizations fall, businesses go bankrupt, and life stagnates. Gardner asserts that the individual’s role in social renewal requires each person to face and look beyond imminent threats. Ultimately, we need a vision that there is something worth saving. Through this vision, Gardner argues, society will begin to renew itself, not permanently, but past its average lifespan, and it will at once become enriched and rejuvenated.
Download or read book Common Errors written by John Gardner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Vintage Shorts selection. In this chapter from his classic instructive handbook, The Art of Fiction, John Gardner illustrates the principles and techniques of good writing. Poor diction, confusing clauses, undue sentimentality and mannerism—these are pitfalls that plague experienced writers as well as those new to the craft. Exemplified with detailed excerpts from classic works of literature, Gardner explores how to achieve vivid, sensuous prose and how to avoid clumsy writing. All those who aspire to learn how to master the craft of fiction will be wise to begin with Gardner’s invaluable advice. An ebook short.
Download or read book October Light written by John Gardner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1986 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story of an old man and an old woman--brother and sister--living together on a farm in Vermont.
Download or read book From Where You Dream written by Robert Olen Butler and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize–winning author “shares his insights into—and passion for—the creation and experience of fiction with total openness” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Robert Olen Butler, author of Perfume River, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, and A Small Hotel, teaches graduate fiction at Florida State University—his version of literary boot camp. In From Where You Dream, Butler reimagines the process of writing as emotional rather than intellectual, and tells writers how to achieve the dreamspace necessary for composing honest, inspired fiction. Proposing that fiction is the exploration of the human condition with yearning as its compass, Butler reinterprets the traditional tools of the craft using the dynamics of desire. Offering a direct view into the mind and craft of a literary master, From Where You Dream is an invaluable tool for the novice and experienced writer alike. “Incisive and provocative, Butler’s tutorials are a must for anyone even thinking about writing fiction, and readers, too, will benefit from his passionate exhortations.” —Booklist
Download or read book Life and Times of Chaucer written by John Gardner and published by Barnes & Noble Publishing. This book was released on 1999 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
