Download or read book The World Below the Window written by William Jay Smith and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2001-04 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This selection of William Jay Smith's work of sixty years covers the entire career of one of America's acknowledged poetic masters. It moves from the dark pre-war lyrics ( Quail in Autumn) to the powerful long-lined free verse of the 1960s ( The Tin Can). Here are memorable WWII lyrics ( Dark Valentine) and masterful light verse ( The Tall Poets), displaying the wit that enlivens all of Smith's work. Previously uncollected poems range from a haunting delineation of the ironies of age in "The Shipwreck" to the dramatic intensity of The Cherokee Lottery, which deals with the forced removal of Indian tribes east of the Mississippi. Praise for William Jay Smith: "A most gifted and original poet... One of the very few who cannot be confused with anybody else."—Richard Wilbur "William Jay Smith has been one of our best poets for more than sixty years, and The Cherokee Lottery is his masterwork: taut, harrowing, eloquent, and profoundly memorable."—Harold Bloom "His best poems are unlike anything else in contemporary American literature... Although often based on realistic situations, Smith's compressed, formal lyrics develop language musically in a way which summons an intricate, dreamlike set of images and associations."—Dana Gioia "William Jay Smith has given us many of the truest and purest poems an American has written: the most resonantly musical, the most magical."—X. J. Kennedy

Download or read book Writing the World written by Kelly Cherry and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 182 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a series of passionate, profound, often humorous, observations, Kelly Cherry explores the art of writing, its relationship to place, and its importance in our lives. "I have never written a 'travel essay, '" Cherry says, but her travels inform her poetry and fiction. Now, seeking to understand what it means to write from any particular place, she charts a course in creative nonfiction prose. From Cleveland to Yalta, Wisconsin to Latvia, England to the Arizona desert or the Philippines, she writes as a way of knowing the world. Along the way we become acquainted with the author herself, whose parents were string quartet violinists. They didn't go to church and, caught up in a rehearsal, sometimes forgot to put dinner on the table, but there was always music in the house (or the tenement flat). Cherry recalls warmly the stories of her childhood: "I don't know whether or not there's a God," her mother would say, "but I know there was a Beethoven, and that's good enough for me." And always there was writing. As young writers do, Cherry earned her living at a variety of jobs--creating fictional histories of overseas orphans for their U.S. sponsors; editing and writing religious textbooks; a stint as a visiting professor in southwest Minnesota, where, in order to live in the dormitory, the only housing practicable for someone without a car, she had to enroll simultaneously as a student (she took astronomy). And in the evenings, the mornings, and other stolen moments, she wrote--as she does now--to create beauty from a specific kind of knowledge, the knowledge we acquire by creating beauty. Cherry explores what it means to be a Southern writer and a woman writer, and discusses the changing face of the profession of writing. "To be a writer in America is to be marginal," she notes, adding that perhaps the best place for a serious writer to reside is "on the edge, outside looking in." You seek to know what it means to be living where you are, and that search is, for a writer, a searching out of language. That quest is, for a writer, a questioning. For a writer, beauty and knowledge begin in the same place. With its brilliant insights and beautiful language, Writing the World is an eloquent meditation on what it means to be a writer. Like Annie Dillard's The Writing Life and Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, Cherry's Writing the World will be a lasting inspiration for anyone who has ever dreamed of being a writer.

Download or read book The Girl in the Black Raincoat written by George Garrett and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncorrected galley proofs, corrected galley proofs and page proofs of the book of short stories and poems edited by Garrett.

Download or read book Now Write written by Sherry Ellis and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-09-07 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of personal writing exercises and commentary from some of today's best novelists, short story writers, and writing teachers, including Jill McCorkle, Amy Bloom, Robert Olen Butler, Steve Almond, Jayne Anne Phillips, Virgil Suarez, Margot Livesay, and more. What's the secret behind the successful and prolific careers of critically acclaimed novelists and short story writers Amy Bloom, Steve Almond, Jayne Anne Phillips, Alison Lurie, and others? Divine assistance? Otherworldly talent? An unsettlingly close relationship with the Muse? While the rest of us are staring at blank sheets of paper, struggling to come up with a first sentence, these writers are busy polishing off story after story and novel after novel. Despite producing work that may seem effortless, all of them have a simple technique for fending off writer's block: the writing exercise. In Now Write!, Sherry Ellis collects the personal writing exercises of today's best writers and lays bare the secret to their success. - In "The Photograph," Jill McCorkle divulges one of her tactics for handling material that takes plots in a million different directions; - National Book Award-nominee Amy Bloom offers "Water Buddies," an exercise for writers practicing their craft in workshops; - Steve Almond, author of My Life in Heavy Metal and Candyfreak, provides a way to avoiding purple prose in "The Five-Second Shortcut to Writing in the Lyric Register"; - and eighty-three more of the country's top writers disclose their strategies for creating memorable prose. Complemented by brief commentary from the authors themselves, the exercises in Now Write! are practical and hands-on. By encouraging writers to shamelessly steal proven techniques that have yielded books which have won National Book Awards, Pulitzers, and Guggenheim grants, Now Write! inspires the aspiring writer to write now.

Download or read book Lee Smith Annie Dillard and the Hollins Group written by Louisiana State University Press and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1999-09 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work examines the history of Hollins College, which by the 1950s had set itself up as a school with a significant women's writing programme. It examines the influence of the mentors in the 1960s and the writers themselves, such as Lee Smith and Annie Dillard.

Download or read book The Girl in the Green Raincoat LP written by Laura Lippman and published by HarperLuxe. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the third trimester of her pregnancy, Baltimore private investigator Tess Monaghan is under doctor's orders to remain immobile. Bored and restless, reduced to watching the world go by outside her window, she takes small comfort in the mundane events she observes . . . like the young woman in a green raincoat who walks her dog at the same time every day. Then one day the dog is running free and its owner is nowhere to be seen. Certain that something is terribly wrong, and incapable of leaving well enough alone, Tess is determined to get to the bottom of the dog walker's abrupt disappearance, even if she must do so from her own bedroom. But her inquisitiveness is about to fling open a dangerous Pandora's box of past crimes and troubling deaths . . . and she's not only putting her own life in jeopardy but also her unborn child's. Previously serialized in the New York Times, and now published in book form for the very first time, The Girl in the Green Raincoat is a masterful Hitchcockian thriller from one of the very best in the business: multiple award-winner Laura Lippman.

Download or read book Sway written by Zachary Lazar and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2008-01-07 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three dramatic and emblematic stories intertwine in Zachary Lazar's extraordinary novel, Sway -- the early days of the Rolling Stones, including the romantic triangle of Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, and Keith Richards; the life of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger; and the community of Charles Manson and his followers. Lazar illuminates an hour in American history when rapture found its roots in idolatrous figures and led to unprovoked and inexplicable violence. Connecting all the stories in this novel is Bobby Beausoleil, a beautiful California boy who appeared in an Anger film and eventually joined the Manson "family." With great artistry, Lazar weaves scenes from these real lives together into a true but heightened reality, making superstars human, giving demons reality, and restoring mythic events to the scale of daily life.

Download or read book Catalog of Copyright Entries written by Library of Congress. Copyright Office and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 1516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Year of Silence written by Madison Smartt Bell and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-12-06 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The National Book Award–finalist movingly examines the lives of a group of New Yorkers deeply affected by one woman’s troubled life—and death. Marian is haunted by an unspoken past reflected in the choices she makes. Whether it’s her drug addiction or her dubious affairs, she finds herself increasingly adrift and alone. Yet in a city of millions, her story plays a part in the lives of others. Jaded cops who register Marian at a glance, a lover who agonizes over her abortion, a close friend stunned by her tragic overdose, a panhandling dwarf making the rounds in her Upper West Side neighborhood—each story weaves back and forth through time, revealing a compelling, compassionate portrait of one woman’s tragic fate. In a novel whose “structure combines delicacy and great tensile strength . . . Bell’s voice is increasingly diverse, accurate and, in this book of mourning, powerfully moving” (Publishers Weekly). One of America’s finest storytellers shows once again that he is a writer of “superb command” (The New York Times).

Download or read book James Dickey written by Henry Hart and published by Picador. This book was released on 2001-09-08 with total page 1484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating biography of one of the most popular, colorful, and notorious American poets of our century. The legendary Southern poet James Dickey never shied away from cultivating a heroic mystique. Like Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway, he earned a reputation as a sportsman, boozer, war hero, and womanizer as well as a great poet, novelist, screenwriter, and essayist. But James Dickey made lying both a literary strategy and a protective camouflage; even his family and closest friends failed to distinguish between the mythical James Dickey and the actual man. Henry Hart sees lying as the central theme to Dickey's life; and in this authoritative, immensely entertaining biography he delves deep behind Dickey's many masks. Letters, anecdotes, tall tales and true ones, as well as the reluctant but finally candid cooperation of Dickey himself animate Hart's narration of a remarkable life. Readers of Dickey's National Book Award-winning poetry, his bestselling novel Deliverance, and anyone who witnessed his electrifying readings of his work will savor this book.

Download or read book American Women Writing Fiction written by Mickey Pearlman and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-10-17 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American literature is no longer the refuge of the solitary hero. Like the society it mirrors, it is now a far richer, many-faceted explication of a complicated and diverse society -- racially, culturally, and ethnically interwoven and at the same time fractured and fractious. Ten women writing fiction in America today -- Toni Cade Bambara, Joan Didion, Louise Erdrich, Gail Godwin, Mary Gordon, Alison Lurie, Joyce Carol Oates, Jayne Anne Phillips, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, and Mary Lee Settle -- represent that geographic, ethnic, and racial diversity that is distinctively American. Their differing perspectives on literature and the American experience have produced Erdrich's stolid North Dakota plainswomen; Didion's sun-baked dreamers and screamers; the urban ethnics -- Irish, Jewish, and black -- of Gordon, Schaeffer, and Bambara; Oates's small-town, often violent, neurotics; Lurie's intellectual sophisticates; and the southern survivors and victims, male and female, of Phillips, Settle, and Godwin. The ten original essays in this collection focus on the traditional themes of identity, memory, family, and enclosure that pervade the fiction of these writers. The fictional women who emerge here, as these critics show, are often caught in the interwoven strands of memory, perceive literal and emotional space as entrapping, find identity elusive and frustrating, and experience the interweaving of silence, solitude, and family in complex patterns. Each essay in this collection is followed by bibliographies of works by and about the writer in question that will be invaluable resources for scholars and general readers alike. Here is a readable critical discussion of ten important contemporary novelists who have broadened the pages of American literature to reflect more clearly the people we are.

Download or read book Shelby Foote written by Robert L. Phillips and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-09-29 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Called the greatest Civil War historian, Shelby Foote began his career as a novelist whose powerful works of fiction rose out of his closeness to life and culture in his native region, the Mississippi Delta country. Later in his career he transformed modern historical prose by his keen sense of the novel. His artistic distance from the elements of regionalism that lie at the heart both of his novels and of his history writing gives his prose great narrative force. This perceptive study fills the genuine need for a sound critical appreciation of Foote the novelist. After he appeared as a sage commentator in the PBS series The Civil War, the popular acclaim that catapulted Shelby Foote the historian to even greater eminence as an American oracle renewed much deserved interest in his novels and in critically rich assessments such as this one.

Download or read book The Girl with Glass Feet written by Ali Shaw and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2010-01-05 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An inventive and richly visual novel about young lovers on a quest to find a cure for a magical ailment, perfect for readers of Alice Hoffman Strange things are happening on the remote and snowbound archipelago of St. Hauda's Land. Unusual winged creatures flit around the icy bogland, albino animals hide themselves in the snow-glazed woods, and Ida Maclaird is slowly turning into glass. Ida is an outsider in these parts, a mainlander who has visited the islands only once before. Yet during that one fateful visit the glass transformation began to take hold, and now she has returned in search of a cure. Midas Crook is a young loner who has lived on the islands his entire life. When he meets Ida, something about her sad, defiant spirit pierces his emotional defenses. As Midas helps Ida come to terms with her affliction, she gradually unpicks the knots of his heart. Love must be paid in precious hours and, as the glass encroaches, time is slipping away fast. Will they find a way to stave off the spread of the glass? The Girl with Glass Feet is a dazzlingly imaginative and magical first novel, a love story to treasure.

Download or read book The Girl Through Whom Sweet Mysteries Flow written by Robin Calvert and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2011-06-28 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most of the main characters in the story are in the early twenties. While some of the plot deals with their romantic problems, the main thing is their attempt to solve the mystery of the murder of Nancy Bonwit, a former girlfriend of Mark Forbes. They come to believe the poems Mark Forbes wrote about Jean Bauer while they were separated have hidden meanings. They believe they can be read as parts of a puzzle, a solution of which will help lead the police to Nancys killer. Mark Forbes is the earnest but flawed main male character in the story. Jean Bauer is the main female character. She and Mark went steady during her Junior and Senior years in high school. Marks clueless indifference to important things like Jeans birthday and Christmas finally result in a dramatic break up on Jeans Prom Night. Jean decides to attend college in New Jersey to get away from Marks and his indifferent ways. After her sophomore year she comes back home to her parents house in Maryland feeling that she has severed her ties with Mark. She transfers to another college near her home where she is befriended by Brenda Cranston who, like Jean, is in her junior years. It proves to be a faithful meeting. It is Brenda who first notices the dual meaning of Marks poems about Jeans and the mystical chemistry that seems to flow between them. And it is Brendas experiments with Jean acting as the guinea pig that prompts Jean to explore caverns , visit Marks first girlfriend, and come dangerously close to a hooded young men who maybe Nancys killer.

Download or read book Touching the Web of Southern Novelists written by David Madden and published by Univ Tennessee Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Madden is one of the South's most notable contemporary writers. His interests are remarkably vast. He has published award-winning fiction, poetry, plays, critical works, and essays on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from history to popular culture. This collection represents Madden's essays on various other southern writers and his own struggle to come to terms with how the works and lives of these writers have influenced his own life and work. By analyzing the charged image of the spider web, as described in chapter four of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, Madden shows that it is a central symbol for his involvement with the interconnected, complex tradition of contemporary southern literature. Touching the Web of Southern Novelists brings together essays on Faulkner, Warren, McCullers, Wolfe, Agee, and a new essay on Evelyn Scott. More than a collection of criticism, the book explores, in overlapping, far-reaching ways, how influence works its way through the southern literary tradition. It also includes an unusually detailed index. Two of the common elements in the essays are the dynamics and consequences of the relationship of an ostensible hero to his or her witnesses and the art of fiction, especially in the technique of using a charged image-a term that Madden invented. Another element is the overwhelming, if sometimes hidden, effect of the Civil War upon southern fiction. Madden provocatively argues that no northerner can write a “true” Civil War novel. All Southern fiction comes out of the Civil War, he argues, and that Absalom, Absalom! is the best Civil War novel because of its complex implications-not because it is overtly about the war. Perhaps most powerful because of its semi-autobiographical nature, Touching the Web of Southern Novelists will appeal to anyone with an interest in literary studies and how art and life in southern novels are entwined with each other-caught in a web.

Download or read book Out of the castle written by Olga Zhvan and published by Litres. This book was released on 2022-01-29 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A girl named Aurelia falls from the real world into a parallel.Getting into various adventures she decides important task and defines its place and purpose.

Download or read book White Rabbit written by David Daniel and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003-03-05 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the search for a serial killer preying on victims in 1967 San Francisco, homicide inspector John Sparrow teams up with underground writer Amy Cole and ventures into her world of free love, music, and psychedelic drugs.