Download or read book Living by Fiction written by Annie Dillard and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Everyone who timidly, bombastically, reverently, scholastically--even fraudulently--essays to 'live the life of the mind' should read this book. It's elegant and classy, like caviar and champagne, and like these two items, it's over much too soon." — Los Angeles Times Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's classic work of literary criticism Living by Fiction is written for—and dedicated to—people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, García Márquez, Beckett, and Calvino, Annie Dillard shows how contemporary fiction works and why traditional fiction will always move us. Like Joyce Cary's Art and Reality, this is a book by a writer on the issues raised by the art of literature. Readers of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Holy the Firm will recognize Dillard's vivid writing, her humor, and the lively way she tackles the urgent questions of meaning in experience itself.
Download or read book The Chestry Oak written by Kate Seredy and published by Purple House Press. This book was released on 2021-12-20 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As he watches his homeland of Hungary being taken over and run by invaders from Nazi Germany, young Prince Michael of Chestry strives to retain his identity and integrity during one of the most dangerous seasons in human history. Michael carries an acorn all the way from his castle home in Chestry Valley to the warm soil of the Hudson Valley farm in the USA where he makes a new home after WWII. It is difficult to decide which are the most unforgettable; the scenes in Hungary, Michael's proud, valiant father and his beloved Nana, or the friendly young GI and his family who take Michael to their hearts and make him their own. Perhaps the most compelling character of all is Midnight, the dancing black stallion, full of fire and beauty, and trained to perform before princes. Kate Seredy's drawings make this a book to treasure. A masterpiece of childhood literature. -Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II The prose is perfect: vivid and often poetic. -National Review ...a modern fairy tale of Hungary. -Kirkus Reviews Kate Seredy's fine illustrations help to link Hungary and America in this story of young Prince Michael whose changing fortunes brought him at last to the warmth of an American home. -Horn Book Occasionally something precious is lost for a while only to be rediscovered and become appreciated all over again. Perhaps never is this more true than with the story Chestry Oak. Originally published in 1948, it is a beautifully told story of a boy who begins with a happy childhood, overcomes peril, and finishes strong. Chestry Oak is a book with all-too-rare and wonderful values that has been cherished by readers for generations. Long out of print, today's readers can once again enjoy the delightful story of Chestry Oak, thanks to Purple House Press. -Jane Claire Lambert, author of Five In A Row
Download or read book Lived Fictions written by John Grant and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea of political unity contains its own opposite, because a political community can never guarantee the equal status of all its members. The price of belonging is an entrenched social stratification within the political unit itself. This book explores how the desire for political unity generates a collective commitment to certain lived fictions – the citizen-state, the market economy, and so forth – that shape our understanding of political legitimacy and responsibility. Canada promises unity through democratic politics, reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, a welfare state, and a multicultural approach to cultural relations. John Grant documents the historical failure of these promises, elaborating the radical institutional and intellectual changes needed to overcome our lived fictions.
Download or read book Live Like Fiction written by Francesco Marconi and published by . This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WHEN YOU IMAGINE THE NEXT 10 YEARSOF YOUR LIFE, WHAT DO YOU SEE? If you're drawing a blank, breaking into a sweat, or visualizing a finish line but not the course to get there, this book is for you.Live Like Fiction provides an original and provocative four-week roadmap to authoring your own life story, and a raft of surprising tactics to make it your reality. In 30 days, this book will help you:* Unearth your purpose and the values that drive you* Determine how to best spend your energy--andwith whom* Learn how to influence your way to the top withempathy, gratitude and persistenceFrancesco Marconi didn't just write the book on owning yoursuccess--he's lived it, as a journalist, speaker, strategy officer at The Associated Press, and fellow at Columbia School of Journalism. Now he layers the tricks of his trade on top of fresh scientific research to offer a compelling step-by-step approach to achievingbreakthrough professional growth. A must for every ambitious college graduate, job seeker, new hire--and anyone with a hunger to become the best version of themselves.
Download or read book Lives of the Novelists written by John Sutherland and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 1456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No previous author has attempted a book such as this: a complete history of novels written in the English language, from the genre's seventeenth-century origins to the present day. In the spirit of Dr. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, acclaimed critic and scholar John Sutherland selects 294 writers whose works illustrate the best of every kind of fiction—from gothic, penny dreadful, and pornography to fantasy, romance, and high literature. Each author was chosen, Professor Sutherland explains, because his or her books are well worth reading and are likely to remain so for at least another century. Sutherland presents these authors in chronological order, in each case deftly combining a lively and informative biographical sketch with an opinionated assessment of the writer's work. Taken together, these novelists provide both a history of the novel and a guide to its rich variety. Always entertaining, and sometimes shocking, Sutherland considers writers as diverse as Daniel Defoe, Henry James, James Joyce, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Michael Crichton, Jeffrey Archer, and Jacqueline Susann. Written for all lovers of fiction, Lives of the Novelists succeeds both as introduction and re-introduction, as Sutherland presents favorite and familiar novelists in new ways and transforms the less favored and less familiar through his relentlessly fascinating readings.
Download or read book Fiction and the Weave of Life written by John Gibson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-06 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophers have struggled to explain how literary fiction can be such an important source of insight into the human condition. John Gibson offers a novel and intriguing account of the relationship between literature and everyday life, and shows how literature can give us an understanding of our world without literally being about our world.
Download or read book Turning Life Into Fiction written by Robin Hemley and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-05-02 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With lively style, good humor and insight, Robin Hemley helps you turn all that you experience into fresh and powerful fiction. By learning to "reimagine", you'll focus on translating real-world people and events into characters and scenes that happen on paper for the first time. You'll think "what if" instead of "what is" in order to take control of your material and cut loose the inhibitions of real life. In these pages, you'll learn how to hone your observation skills and fill your journal with rich and vivid details. (Because, as Hemley writes, "Life is in the details, and so is good fiction".) You'll see how to decide which ideas to bring to fiction and which ones to let go. And you'll learn how to: find the right form - novel, short story, vignette, memoir - for the story you want to tell; use "triggers" to start your reader's imagination rolling; keep your fiction emotionally honest by making the right choices between "the way it happened" and what the story dictates (ask "Is it believable?", not "Did it happen?"); create composites of real people and places that fit the unique needs of your story and empower your imagination; focus your fiction. Make sure everything, every character counts - and eliminate "people who sit at the end of the bar without a role to play"; fictionalize - ethically and legally - other people's stories. Learn your rights as a writer versus their rights to privacy. (Can you use actual names? When do you need to get permission?). To illustrate how writers feed their fiction with reality, Hemley uses examples from his own work and from fiction masters of yesterday and today. At the end of each chapter, challenging exercises help you apply the basictheories and push them even further. An adventurous read, Turning Life Into Fiction will help you create fiction that's just as strange and wonderful and "real" as the life that inspires it.
Download or read book Extreme Fabulations written by Steven Shaviro and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of science fiction narratives and the light they shed on human life, the unknowable future, and the vagaries of unforeseeable change. With this book, Steven Shaviro offers a thought experiment. He discusses a number of science fiction narratives: three novels, one novella, three short stories, and one musical concept album. Shaviro not only analyzes these works in detail but also uses them to ask questions about human, and more generally, biological life: about its stubborn insistence and yet fragility; about the possibilities and perils of seeking to control it; about the aesthetic and social dimensions of human existence, in relation to the nonhuman; and about the ethical value of human life under conditions of extreme oppression and devastation. Shaviro pursues these questions through the medium of science fiction because this form of storytelling offers us a unique way of grappling with issues that deeply and unavoidably concern us but that are intractable to rational argumentation or to empirical verification. The future is unavoidably vague and multifarious; it stubbornly resists our efforts to know it in advance, let alone to guide it or circumscribe it. But science fiction takes up this very vagueness and indeterminacy and renders it into the form of a self-consciously fictional narrative. It gives us characters who experience, and respond to, the vagaries of unforeseeable change.
Download or read book Casey Over There written by Staton Rabin and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P. This book was released on 1994 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this picture book, Aubrey's brother is fighting in the trenches, while he is growing up in Brooklyn during World War I.
Download or read book Materiality in Modernist Short Fiction written by Laura Oulanne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-30 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Materiality in Modernist Short Fiction provides a fresh approach to reading material things in modern fiction, accounting for the interplay of the material and the cultural. This volume investigates how Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys use the short story form to evoke the material world as both living and lived, and how the spaces they create for challenging gendered social norms can also be nonanthropocentric spaces for encounters between the human and the nonhuman. Using the unique knowledge created by literary works to spark new conversations between phenomenology, cognitive studies, and new materialisms, complemented with a feminist perspective, this book explores how literature can touch the basic experience of being in, feeling and making sense of a material world that is itself alive and active. From a sensitive reading of how three women used the material world to make their readers see, feel, and question the norms shaping our experience, this volume draws a theory of reading affective materiality that illuminates modernism and the short story form but also reaches beyond them.
Download or read book That We May Live written by Ge Yan and published by Calico. This book was released on 2020 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An approachable introduction to contemporary speculative fiction from China and Hong Kong that touches on issues of urbanization, sexuality, and propaganda"--
Download or read book Fiction and the Figures of Life written by William H. Gass and published by David R. Godine Publisher. This book was released on 1971 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays by William H. Gass.
Download or read book Daniel Defoe written by Maximillian E. Novak and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 780 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daniel Defoe led an exciting and indeed precarious life. A provocative pamphleteer and journalist, a spy and double agent, a revolutionary and a dreamer, he was variously hunted by mobs with murderous intent and treated as a celebrity by the most powerful leaders of the country. Imprisoned many times, pilloried and reviled by his enemies, through it all he managed to produce some of the most significant literature of the eighteenth century. Daniel Defoe: Master of Fictions is the first biography to view Defoe's complex life through the angle of vision that is most important to us as modern readers--his career as a writer. Maximillian Novak, a leading authority on Defoe, ranges from the writer's earliest collection of brief stories, which he presented to his future wife under the sobriquet Bellmour, to his Compleat English Gentleman, left unpublished at his death. Novak illuminates such works as Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, novels that changed the course of fiction in their time and have remained towering classics to this day. And he reveals a writer who was a superb observer of his times--an age of dramatic historical, political, and social change. Indeed, through his many pamphlets, newspapers, books of travel, and works of fiction, Defoe commented on everything from birth control to the price of coal, and from flying machines to the dangers of the plague. Beautifully and authoritatively written, this is the first serious, full-scale biography of Defoe to appear in a decade. It gives us, for the first time, a full understanding of the thought and personal experience that lie behind some of the great works of English literature.
Download or read book The Winged Watchman written by and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Letters Fictions Lives written by Michael Anesko and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-08-28 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this unique and long-awaited volume, Michael Anesko documents the literary cross-fertilization between Henry James and William Dean Howells, collecting 151 letters, nearly all the extant correspondence between the two men, as well as the most significant critical commentary James wrote on Howells and Howells wrote on James. Scholars have long recognized the peculiar importance of the relationship between these two exponents of realistic fiction--their mutual respect and occasional animosity. But the record of their affinities and substantial differences has never before been so amply and compellingly established. Containing dozens of previously unpublished letters by James, and featuring a detailed biographical chronology as well as extensive interpretive commentaries that meticulously chart the development of this remarkable literary friendship, Letters, Fictions, Lives, edited to the highest standards of scholarly excellence, will prove an invaluable resource for scholars and students of James and Howells, and will hold great interest for dedicated readers of their fiction and for those studying epistolary issues and literary influence between contemporaries.
Download or read book How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe Enhanced Edition written by Charles Yu and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2010-09-07 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This enhanced eBook includes video, audio, photographic, and linked content, as well as a bonus short story. Hear TAMMY talk. Learn the origins of Minor Universe 31. See the TM-31. Take a trip in it. Photos and illustrations appear as hyperlinked endnotes. Video and audio are embedded directly in text. *Video and audio may not play on all readers. Check your user manual for details. National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award winner Charles Yu delivers his debut novel, a razor-sharp, ridiculously funny, and utterly touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space–time. Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the past. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician—part counselor, part gadget repair man—steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he’s not taking client calls or consoling his boss, Phil, who could really use an upgrade, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle of time, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and Ed, a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. He learns that the key may be found in a book he got from his future self. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and he’s the author. And somewhere inside it is the information that could help him—in fact it may even save his life. Wildly new and adventurous, Yu’s debut is certain to send shock waves of wonder through literary space–time.
Download or read book Discognition written by Steven Shaviro and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is consciousness? What is it like to feel pain, or to see the color red? Do robots and computers really think? For that matter, do plants and amoebas think? If we ever meet intelligent aliens, will we be able to understand what they say to us? Philosophers and scientists are still unable to answer questions like these. Perhaps science fiction can help. In Discognition, Steven Shaviro looks at science fiction novels and stories that explore the extreme possibilities of human and alien sentience.
