Download or read book Working On My Novel written by Cory Arcangel and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it feel like to try and create something new? How is it possible to find a space for the demands of writing a novel in a world of instant communication? Working on My Novel is about the act of creation and the gap between the different ways we express ourselves today. Exploring the extremes of making art, from satisfaction and even euphoria to those days or nights when nothing will come, it's the story of what it means to be a creative person, and why we keep on trying.

Download or read book A Little Life written by Hanya Yanagihara and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-01-26 with total page 834 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.

Download or read book Why I Write written by George Orwell and published by Renard Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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

Download or read book Temporary written by Hilary Leichter and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.” This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.

Download or read book A Woman Is No Man written by Etaf Rum and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Goodreads Choice Awards Finalist for Best Fiction and Best Debut • BookBrowse's Best Book of the Year • A Marie Claire Best Women's Fiction of the Year • A Real Simple Best Book of the Year • A PopSugar Best Book of the Year All Written By Females • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A Washington Post 10 Books to Read in March • A Newsweek Best Book of the Summer • A USA Today Best Book of the Week • A Washington Book Review Difficult-To-Put-Down Novel • A Refinery 29 Best Books of the Month • A Buzzfeed News 4 Books We Couldn't Put Down Last Month • A New Arab Best Books by Arab Authors • An Electric Lit 20 Best Debuts of the First Half of 2019 • A The Millions Most Anticipated Books of 2019 “Garnering justified comparisons to Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns... Etaf Rum’s debut novel is a must-read about women mustering up the bravery to follow their inner voice.” —Refinery 29 The New York Times bestseller and Read with Jenna TODAY SHOW Book Club pick telling the story of three generations of Palestinian-American women struggling to express their individual desires within the confines of their Arab culture in the wake of shocking intimate violence in their community. "Where I come from, we’ve learned to silence ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence will save us. Where I come from, we keep these stories to ourselves. To tell them to the outside world is unheard of—dangerous, the ultimate shame.” Palestine, 1990. Seventeen-year-old Isra prefers reading books to entertaining the suitors her father has chosen for her. Over the course of a week, the naïve and dreamy girl finds herself quickly betrothed and married, and is soon living in Brooklyn. There Isra struggles to adapt to the expectations of her oppressive mother-in-law Fareeda and strange new husband Adam, a pressure that intensifies as she begins to have children—four daughters instead of the sons Fareeda tells Isra she must bear. Brooklyn, 2008. Eighteen-year-old Deya, Isra’s oldest daughter, must meet with potential husbands at her grandmother Fareeda’s insistence, though her only desire is to go to college. Deya can’t help but wonder if her options would have been different had her parents survived the car crash that killed them when Deya was only eight. But her grandmother is firm on the matter: the only way to secure a worthy future for Deya is through marriage to the right man. But fate has a will of its own, and soon Deya will find herself on an unexpected path that leads her to shocking truths about her family—knowledge that will force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, the past, and her own future.

Download or read book MFA vs NYC written by Chad Harbach and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writers write—but what do they do for money? In a widely read essay entitled "MFA vs NYC," bestselling novelist Chad Harbach (The Art of Fielding) argued that the American literary scene has split into two cultures: New York publishing versus university MFA programs. This book brings together established writers, MFA professors and students, and New York editors, publicists, and agents to talk about these overlapping worlds, and the ways writers make (or fail to make) a living within them. Should you seek an advanced degree, or will workshops smother your style? Do you need to move to New York, or will the high cost of living undo you? What's worse—having a day job or not having health insurance? How do agents decide what to represent? Will Big Publishing survive? How has the rise of MFA programs affected American fiction? The expert contributors, including George Saunders, Elif Batuman, and Fredric Jameson, consider all these questions and more, with humor and rigor. MFA vs NYC is a must-read for aspiring writers, and for anyone interested in the present and future of American letters.

Download or read book In the Quick written by Kate Hope Day and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • A young, ambitious female astronaut’s life is upended by a love affair that threatens the rescue of a lost crew in this brilliantly imagined novel “with echoes of Station Eleven, The Martian, and, yes, Jane Eyre” (Observer). NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VULTURE AND SHE READS • “The female astronaut novel we never knew we needed.”—Entertainment Weekly June is a brilliant but difficult girl with a gift for mechanical invention who leaves home to begin grueling astronaut training at the National Space Program. Younger by two years than her classmates at Peter Reed, the school on campus named for her uncle, she flourishes in her classes but struggles to make friends and find true intellectual peers. Six years later, she has gained a coveted post as an engineer on a space station—and a hard-won sense of belonging—but is haunted by the mystery of Inquiry, a revolutionary spacecraft powered by her beloved late uncle’s fuel cells. The spacecraft went missing when June was twelve years old, and while the rest of the world seems to have forgotten the crew, June alone has evidence that makes her believe they are still alive. She seeks out James, her uncle’s former protégé, also brilliant, also difficult, who has been trying to discover why Inquiry’s fuel cells failed. James and June forge an intense intellectual bond that becomes an electric attraction. But the relationship that develops between them as they work to solve the fuel cell’s fatal flaw threatens to destroy everything they’ve worked so hard to create—and any chance of bringing the Inquiry crew home alive. A propulsive narrative of one woman’s persistence and journey to self-discovery, In the Quick is an exploration of the strengths and limits of human ability in the face of hardship, and the costs of human ingenuity. This edition includes a bonus chapter.

Download or read book We Are Not Ourselves written by Matthew Thomas and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-08-19 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Destined to be a classic, this "powerfully moving" (Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding), multigenerational debut novel of an Irish-American family is nothing short of a "masterwork" (Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End). Born in 1941, Eileen Tumulty is raised by her Irish immigrant parents in Woodside, Queens, in an apartment where the mood swings between heartbreak and hilarity, depending on whether guests are over and how much alcohol has been consumed. When Eileen meets Ed Leary, a scientist whose bearing is nothing like those of the men she grew up with, she thinks she's found the perfect partner to deliver her to the cosmopolitan world she longs to inhabit. They marry, and Eileen quickly discovers Ed doesn't aspire to the same, ever bigger, stakes in the American Dream. Eileen encourages her husband to want more: a better job, better friends, a better house, but as years pass it becomes clear that his growing reluctance is part of a deeper psychological shift. An inescapable darkness enters their lives, and Eileen and Ed and their son Connell try desperately to hold together a semblance of the reality they have known, and to preserve, against long odds, an idea they have cherished of the future. Through the Learys, novelist Matthew Thomas charts the story of the American Century, particularly the promise of domestic bliss and economic prosperity that captured hearts and minds after WWII. The result is a riveting and affecting work of art; one that reminds us that life is more than a tally of victories and defeats, that we live to love and be loved, and that we should tell each other so before the moment slips away. Epic in scope, heroic in character, masterful in prose, We Are Not Ourselves heralds the arrival of a major new talent in contemporary fiction.

Download or read book Back Talk written by Danielle Lazarin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Beautifully crafted . . . the sentences in these stories are living and seamless, as if Lazarin had run her hand over them until they became smooth and gleaming with the evidence of her touch.” —Carmen Maria Machado, The New York Times Book Review From an award-winning writer, a stunning collection of stories about women’s unexpressed desires and needs, and the unexpected ways they resurface In “Floor Plans,” a woman at the end of her marriage tests her power when she inadvertently befriends the neighbor trying to buy her apartment. In “Appetite,” a sixteen-year old grieving her mother’s death experiences first love and questions how much more heartbreak she and her family can endure. In “Dinosaurs,” a recent widower and a young babysitter help each other navigate how much they have to give—and how much they can take—from the people around them. Through stories that are at once empathetic and unexpected, these women and girls defiantly push the boundaries between selfishness and self-possession. With a fresh voice and bold honesty, Back Talk examines how narrowly our culture allows women to express their desires. “Deceptively quiet but packs a powerful punch . . . The best collection I’ve read in years, from a phenomenal new talent.” —Celeste Ng

Download or read book Famous Men Who Never Lived written by K. Chess and published by Tin House Books. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for a 2019 Sidewise Award “Conceptually adventurous yet full of feeling. . . . smart, thought-provoking, and thoroughly enjoyable.” —Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown Wherever Hel looks, New York City is both reassuringly familiar and terribly wrong. As one of the thousands who fled the outbreak of nuclear war in an alternate United States—an alternate timeline, somewhere across the multiverse—she finds herself living as a refugee in our own not-so-parallel New York. The slang and technology are foreign to her, the politics and art unrecognizable. While others, like her partner, Vikram, attempt to assimilate, Hel refuses to reclaim her former career or create a new life. Instead, she obsessively rereads Vikram’s copy of The Pyronauts—a science fiction masterwork in her world that now only exists as a single flimsy paperback—and becomes determined to create a museum dedicated to preserving the remaining artifacts and memories of her vanished culture. But the refugees are unwelcome and Hel’s efforts are met with either indifference or hostility. And when the only copy of The Pyronauts goes missing, Hel must decide how far she is willing to go to recover it and finally face her own anger, guilt, and grief over what she has truly lost. With Famous Men Who Never Lived, K Chess has created a compelling and inventive speculative work on what home means to those who have lost it forever.

Download or read book Olympus Texas written by Stacey Swann and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Good Morning America Book Club Pick! • A bighearted novel with technicolor characters, plenty of Texas swagger, and a powder keg of a plot in which marriages struggle, rivalries flare, and secrets explode, all with a clever wink toward classical mythology. For fans of Madeline Miller's Circe: "The Iliad meets Friday Night Lights in this muscular, captivating debut" (Oprah Daily). The Briscoe family is once again the talk of their small town when March returns to East Texas two years after he was caught having an affair with his brother's wife. His mother, June, hardly welcomes him back with open arms. Her husband's own past affairs have made her tired of being the long-suffering spouse. Is it, perhaps, time for a change? Within days of March's arrival, someone is dead, marriages are upended, and even the strongest of alliances are shattered. In the end, the ties that hold them together might be exactly what drag them all down. An expansive tour de force, Olympus, Texas cleverly weaves elements of classical mythology into a thoroughly modern family saga, rich in drama and psychological complexity. After all, at some point, don't we all wonder: What good is this destructive force we call love?

Download or read book 90 Days To Your Novel written by Sarah Domet and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-12-20 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Got 90 Days? Then You Can Be a Novelist... Many famous authors write their novels in a matter of weeks. William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks. Joyce Carol Oates often cranks out two or three books a year. Stephen King believes first drafts should take no more than three months to complete. So, what's the trick? Novel writing isn't about inspiration. It's about the time, energy, and discipline to see the project to its finish. With 90 Days To Your Novel at your side, now is the time. This inspiring guide will be your push, your deadline, and your spark to finally, without excuses, and in three short months, nail that first draft of your novel. The difference between wanna-be writers and real writers is the difference between talk and work. If you commit to the schedule and the techniques within 90 Days to Your Novel and invest two to three hours a day for twelve weeks, you will complete your book. An outline will appear. Characters will take shape. A plot will emerge. Scenes will come together and form a story worth reading. And then the talking can begin! This helpful guide provides: • Instruction that distills the elements of the novel - from crafting your outline to developing intriguing characters and believable plots • Strategies for gaining support from your family and friends • Motivating insights about writing and writers to minimize your inevitable moments of doubt • A schedule to keep you in the writing zone and keep you focused, creative, and working Whether you're writing your first novel or your third, this guide provides the coaching, the planning, and the writerly commiseration to help get your book written.

Download or read book Perennial Seller written by Ryan Holiday and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-07-18 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book that Inc. says "every entrepreneur should read" and an FT Book of the Month selection... How did the movie The Shawshank Redemption fail at the box office but go on to gross more than $100 million as a cult classic? How did The 48 Laws of Power miss the bestseller lists for more than a decade and still sell more than a million copies? How is Iron Maiden still filling stadiums worldwide without radio or TV exposure forty years after the band was founded? Bestselling author and marketer Ryan Holiday calls such works and artists perennial sellers. How do they endure and thrive while most books, movies, songs, video games, and pieces of art disappear quickly after initial success? How can we create and market creative works that achieve longevity? Holiday explores this mystery by drawing on his extensive experience working with businesses and creators such as Google, American Apparel, and the author John Grisham, as well as his interviews with the minds behind some of the greatest perennial sellers of our time. His fascinating examples include: • Rick Rubin, producer for Adele, Jay-Z, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who teaches his artists to push past short-term thinking and root their work in long-term inspiration. • Tim Ferriss, whose books have sold millions of copies, in part because he rigorously tests every element of his work to see what generates the strongest response. • Seinfeld, which managed to capture both the essence of the nineties and timeless themes to become a modern classic. • Harper Lee, who transformed a muddled manuscript into To Kill a Mockingbird with the help of the right editor and feedback. • Winston Churchill, Stefan Zweig, and Lady Gaga, who each learned the essential tenets of building a platform of loyal, dedicated supporters. Holiday reveals that the key to success for many perennial sellers is that their creators don’t distinguish between the making and the marketing. The product’s purpose and audience are in the creator’s mind from day one. By thinking holistically about the relationship between their audience and their work, creators of all kinds improve the chances that their offerings will stand the test of time.

Download or read book A Brilliant Novel in the Works written by Yuvi Zalkow and published by MP Publishing. This book was released on 2012-04-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Yuvi’s wife finds him in his underwear, standing on top of his desk, she isn’t particularly impressed with his writing habits. But Yuvi worries. He has a wife who wants things he can’t give her, an editor who wants a book he can’t deliver, a brother-in-law whose gastrointestinal disease may lead him to a morbid end, and dead parents who, well, they don’t really want anything, but that doesn’t stop the memory of them from haunting him. As the structure of Yuvi’s novel falls apart, so do his life and marriage. His novel and his life blend together as Yuvi struggles to pull out of the mess. He travels from his suburban Jewish childhood in Atlanta to the North Carolina mountains of his father’s youth, to several hospital waiting rooms, to the living room of a grieving Palestinian man, and even to Uranus (and back, of course). Heartbreaking and hilarious, 'A Brilliant Novel in the Works' is the utterly original debut novel from Yuvi Zalkow, praised by Cheryl Strayed as “the secret love child of the smartest person you’ve ever met and the weirdo who lives down the block.”

Download or read book Such Good Work written by Johannes Lichtman and published by Simon & Schuster. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Johannes Lichtman comes a wisely comic debut novel about a teacher whose efforts to stay sober land him in Sweden, but the refugee crisis forces a very different kind of reckoning. You don’t have to be perfect to do good... Jonas Anderson wants a fresh start. He’s made plenty of bad decisions in his life, and at age twenty-eight he’s been fired from yet another teaching position after assigning homework like, Attend a stranger’s funeral and write about it. But, he’s sure a move to Sweden, the country of his mother’s birth, will be just the thing to kick-start a new and improved—and newly sober—Jonas. When he arrives in Malmo in 2015, the city is struggling with the influx of tens of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees. Driven by an existential need to “do good,” Jonas begins volunteering with an organization that teaches Swedish to young migrants. The connections he makes there, and one student in particular, might send him down the right path toward fulfillment—if he could just get out of his own way. “Such Good Work is, indeed, a bit Jonas-like: it’s wary of affectation or grandstanding; it works small, as if from a sense of modesty, a reluctance to presume; it cuts sincerity with the driest of humor” (The New Yorker). In his debut, Lichtman, “a remarkable thinker and social satirist” (The New York Times Book Review), spins a darkly comic story, brought to life with wry observations and searing questions about our modern world, and told with equal measures of grace and wit.

Download or read book Not Working written by Lisa Owens and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-04-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Lisa Owens is a comedy genius' Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Animals 'Laugh-out-loud funny' Observer 'Insanely funny but also moving and true' Nathan Filer, author of The Shock of the Fall 'A deadpan comic debut for the procrastination generation' Guardian Now and again we all lie awake wondering what on earth we're doing with our lives . . . don't we? Claire Flannery has had more than a few sleepless nights lately. Maybe she shouldn't have walked out of her job with no idea what to do next. Maybe she should think before she speaks -- and maybe then her mother would start returning her calls. Maybe she should be spending more time going to art galleries, or reading up on current affairs, and less time in her pyjamas, entering competitions on the internet. Then again, maybe the perfect solution to life's problems only arises when you stop looking for it . . .

Download or read book The Best American Short Stories 2016 written by Junot Díaz and published by Mariner Books. This book was released on 2016 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Award-winning and best-selling author Junot Díaz guest edits this year's The Best American Short Stories, the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction.