Download or read book Writers Readers and Reputations written by Philip Waller and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 1200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Writers Readers and Reputations written by Philip Waller and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 1194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philip Waller explores the literary world in which the modern best-seller first emerged, with writers promoted as stars and celebrities, advertising both products and themselves.
Download or read book Writers Readers and Reputations written by Philip Waller and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2006-04-27 with total page 1208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writers, Readers, and Reputations explores the literary world in which the modern best-seller first emerged. Writers were promoted as stars and celebrities, advertising both products and themselves. Philip Waller's detailed and entertaining study is a collective biography of literary figures, some forgotten, some enduring, over half a century. - ;Charles Dickens died in 1870, the same year in which universal elementary education was introduced. During the following generation a mass reading public emerged, and the term 'best-seller' was coined. In new and cheap editions Dickens's stories sold hugely, but these were progressively outstripped in quantity by the likes of Hall Caine and Marie Corelli, Charles Garvice and Nat Gould. Who has now heard of these writers? Yet Hall Caine, for one, boasted of having made more money from his pen than any previous author. This book presents a panoramic view of literary life in Britain over half a century from 1870 to 1914, teasing out authors' relations with the reading public and tracing how reputations were made and unmade. It surveys readers' habits, the book trade, popular literary magazines and the role of reviewers, and examines the construction of a classical canon by critics concerned about the supposed corruption of popular taste. Certain writers were elevated as national heroes, yet Britain drew its writers from abroad as well as from home. Authors became stars and celebrities, and a literary tourism grew around their haunts. They advertised products from cigarettes to toothpaste; they were fashion-conscious and promoted themselves via profiles, interviews, and carefully posed photographs; they went on lecture tours to America; and their names were pushed by a new professional breed: the literary agent. Some angled for knighthoods, even peerages, and cut a figure in high society and London clubland. The debated public issues of the day and campaigned on all manner of things from questions of faith and women's rights to censorship and conscription. During the Great War they penned propaganda. Meanwhile the cinema was developing to challenge the supremacy of the written word over the imagination. Authors took to that too, as an opportunity for new adventure. Writers, Readers, and Reputations is richly entertaining and informative, amounting to a collective biography of a generation of writers and their world. - ;the remarkable thing about this extraordinary book is that throughout its thousand pages it remains consistently readable, enjoyable, and informative... Waller's style is addictive and discursive...and the reader will gain greatly the more that she or he reads - William Whyte, EHR, cxxi 494;The richness of Waller's study is beyond question. This is an extraordinary mine of fact, detail, quotation, anecdote and reminiscence. Every reader, no matter how familiar with the literature of the period, will learn from the range of its excavations. - Dinah Birch, TLS;[A] serious achievement...It will prove an invaluable resource to scholars seeking a reference tool on a huge range of topics, not only because of its coverage, but because Waller produces the kind of scholarship on which one can rely. - The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 1;...a magnificent study, one that will be recognised as a defining literary history of the period. - The Review of English Studies, Vol58, No. 233
Download or read book Writers Lovers written by Lily King and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2020-03-03 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today Emma Roberts Belletrist Book Club Pick A New York Times Book Review’s Group Text Selection "I loved this book not just from the first chapter or the first page but from the first paragraph... The voice is just so honest and riveting and insightful about creativity and life." —Curtis Sittenfeld An extraordinary new novel of art, love, and ambition from Lily King, the New York Times bestselling author of Euphoria Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Lily King returns with another instant New York Times bestseller: an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman. Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she’s been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey’s fight to fulfill her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink. Writers & Lovers follows Casey—a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist—in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King’s trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.
Download or read book A Reader s Manifesto written by B. R. Myers and published by Melville House Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Including: A response to critics, and: Ten rules for "serious" writers, the author continues his fight on behalf of the American reader, arguing against pretension in so-called "literary" fiction, naming names and exposing the literary status quo.
Download or read book Paraliterary written by Merve Emre and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[Emre’s] intellectual moves . . . are many, subtle, and a pleasure to follow. . . . None of her bad readers could have written this very good book.” —Los Angeles Review of Books Literature departments tend to be focused on turning out, “good” readers—attentive to nuance, aware of history, interested in literary texts as self-contained works. But the majority of readers are, to use Merve Emre’s tongue-in-cheek term, “bad” readers. They read fiction and poetry to be moved, distracted, instructed, improved, engaged as citizens. How should we think about those readers, and what should we make of the structures, well outside the academy, that generate them? We should, Emre argues, think of such readers not as non-literary but as paraliterary—thriving outside literary institutions. She traces this phenomenon to the postwar period, when literature played a key role in the rise of American power. At the same time as American universities were producing good readers by the hundreds, many more thousands of bad readers were learning elsewhere to be disciplined public communicators, whether in diplomatic and ambassadorial missions, private and public cultural exchange programs, multinational corporations, or global activist groups. As we grapple with literature’s diminished role in the public sphere, Paraliterary suggests a new way to think about literature, its audience, and its potential, one that looks at the civic institutions that have long engaged readers ignored by the academy. “Paraliterary does for . . . reading . . . what The Program Era did for writing: profoundly upend what we thought we knew about how institutions other than the university have shaped our culture and our engagement with it.” —Deborah Nelson, University of Chicago
Download or read book Transcription written by Kate Atkinson and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A dramatic story of WWII espionage, betrayal, and loyalty, by the #1 bestselling author of Life After Life In 1940, eighteen-year old Juliet Armstrong is reluctantly recruited into the world of espionage. Sent to an obscure department of MI5 tasked with monitoring the comings and goings of British Fascist sympathizers, she discovers the work to be by turns both tedious and terrifying. But after the war has ended, she presumes the events of those years have been relegated to the past forever. Ten years later, now a radio producer at the BBC, Juliet is unexpectedly confronted by figures from her past. A different war is being fought now, on a different battleground, but Juliet finds herself once more under threat. A bill of reckoning is due, and she finally begins to realize that there is no action without consequence. Transcription is a work of rare depth and texture, a bravura modern novel of extraordinary power, wit and empathy. It is a triumphant work of fiction from one of the best writers of our time.
Download or read book The Catcher in the Rye written by J. D. Salinger and published by ببلومانيا للنشر والتوزيع. This book was released on 2024-06-28 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Catcher in the Rye," written by J.D. Salinger and published in 1951, is a classic American novel that explores the themes of adolescence, alienation, and identity through the eyes of its protagonist, Holden Caulfield. The novel is set in the 1950s and follows Holden, a 16-year-old who has just been expelled from his prep school, Pencey Prep. Disillusioned with the world around him, Holden decides to leave Pencey early and spend a few days alone in New York City before returning home. Over the course of these days, Holden interacts with various people, including old friends, a former teacher, and strangers, all the while grappling with his feelings of loneliness and dissatisfaction. Holden is deeply troubled by the "phoniness" of the adult world and is haunted by the death of his younger brother, Allie, which has left a lasting impact on him. He fantasizes about being "the catcher in the rye," a guardian who saves children from losing their innocence by catching them before they fall off a cliff into adulthooda. The novel ends with Holden in a mental institution, where he is being treated for a nervous breakdown. He expresses some hope for the future, indicating a possible path to recovery..
Download or read book The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights written by John Steinbeck and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2001-05-03 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the author's reinterpretation of tales from Malory's Morte d'Arthur.
Download or read book Writing Reviews for Readers Advisory written by Brad Hooper and published by American Library Association. This book was released on 2010 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With energy and commitment born of professional experience and a deep love for graphic novels, Goldsmith provides the first guide to the genre aimed specifically at readers advisors, while presenting an abundance of resources useful to every librarian.
Download or read book Those Who Write for Immortality written by H. J. Jackson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great writers of the past whose works we still read and love will be read forever. They will survive the test of time. We remember authors of true genius because their writings are simply the best. Or . . . might there be other reasons that account for an author’s literary fate? This original book takes a fresh look at our beliefs about literary fame by examining how it actually comes about. H. J. Jackson wrestles with entrenched notions about recognizing genius and the test of time by comparing the reputations of a dozen writers of the Romantic period—some famous, some forgotten. Why are we still reading Jane Austen but not Mary Brunton, when readers in their own day sometimes couldn’t tell their works apart? Why Keats and not Barry Cornwall, who came from the same circle of writers and had the same mentor? Why not that mentor, Leigh Hunt, himself? Jackson offers new and unorthodox accounts of the coming-to-fame of some of Britain’s most revered authors and compares their reputations and afterlives with those of their contemporary rivals. What she discovers about trends, champions, institutional power, and writers’ conscious efforts to position themselves for posterity casts fresh light on the actual processes that lead to literary fame.
Download or read book Reading Like a Writer written by Francine Prose and published by Union Books. This book was released on 2012-04-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In her entertaining and edifying New York Times bestseller, acclaimed author Francine Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and tricks of the masters to discover why their work has endured. Written with passion, humour and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart – to take pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; to look to John le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue and to Flannery O’ Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail; to be inspired by Emily Brontë ’ s structural nuance and Charles Dickens’ s deceptively simple narrative techniques. Most importantly, Prose cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which all literature is crafted, and reminds us that good writing comes out of good reading.
Download or read book Everything You Know written by Zoe Heller and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2010-10-22 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Willy Muller is an embittered writer of celebrity bios and an equal-opportunity misanthropist. At the age of fifty, he has survived imprisonment for murdering his wife, years of venomous hate mail from the British public and, most recently, the suicide of his daughter Sadie. Willy needs a rest, but he's not going to get it. While recuperating from a heart attack in a Mexican resort with his magnificently silly girlfriend Penny and his vodka-drenched friend Harry, Willy finds himself drawn into a troubling confrontation with his past. He should be working on the screen adaptation of his infamous hack memoir, To Have and to Hold, but instead he becomes engrossed in Sadie's tragic diaries. Reluctantly, he considers his chaotic family history and the notion that "only when you die do you run out of chances to be good." Set in Mexico, Los Angeles and London, Everything You Know is a story of love and loathing, sex and death, and filial relations gone horribly awry. Acidly funny and deeply affecting, it marks the debut of a brilliant and immensely stylish young writer.
Download or read book Contest written by Matthew Reilly and published by Pan Australia. This book was released on 2007-11-10 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thrilling international bestseller from Australia's favourite novelist, author of the Scarecrow series and Jack West Jr series with new novel The One Impossible Labyrinth out now. "Reilly hurls readers into an adrenaline-drenched thrill ride ... impossible to put down." Orlando Sentinel "Reilly ... can inspire awe. Speed demons, take note." Publishers Weekly The New York State Library. A silent sanctuary of knowledge; a 100-year-old labyrinth of towering bookcases, narrow aisles and spiralling staircases. For Doctor Stephen Swain and his eight-year-old daughter, Holly, it is the site of a nightmare. For one night, the State Library is to be the venue for a contest. A contest in which Stephen Swain is to compete - whether he likes it or not. The rules are simple: seven contestants will enter, only one will leave. With his daughter in his arms, Swain is plunged into a terrifying fight for survival. He can choose to run, to hide or to fight - but if he wants to live, he has to win. Because in a contest like this, unless you leave as the victor, you do not leave at all. Fans of Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton will love Matthew Reilly.
Download or read book Monsieur written by Lawrence Durrell and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the olive trees of southern France to Gnostic cults in Egypt, a man and his lovers are invented and reinvented in this first volume of a great literary adventure. For British doctor Bruce Drexel, a return to Provence is bittersweet. Here, at a rustic chateau, he once fell in love with Sylvie, the Frenchwoman who would become his wife, and befriended her brother, Piers. The three made up a peculiar, potent ménage for years until Sylvie’s descent into madness and Piers’s suicide. As Drexel attends to Piers’s affairs, he becomes steeped in the memories of a spiritually transformational trip to Egypt; the band of intellectual confederates who used to be his intimate friends; and a three-sided love that became his reason for being. So begins Monsieur, the masterful first entry of Durrell’s Avignon Quintet, an infinite regress of memory and imagination that challenges the formal conventions of fiction.
Download or read book What to Read and Why written by Francine Prose and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-07-03 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brilliant collection, the follow-up to her New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, the distinguished novelist, literary critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above all others, from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to Jennifer Egan and Roberto Bolaño. In an age defined by hyper-connectivity and constant stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the great enjoyment it brings. Inspiring and illuminating, What to Read and Why includes selections culled from Prose’s previous essays, reviews, and introductions, combined with new, never-before-published pieces that focus on her favorite works of fiction and nonfiction, on works by masters of the short story, and even on books by photographers like Diane Arbus. Prose considers why the works of literary masters such as Mary Shelley, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Jane Austen have endured, and shares intriguing insights about modern authors whose words stimulate our minds and enlarge our lives, including Roberto Bolaño, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jennifer Egan, and Mohsin Hamid. Prose implores us to read Mavis Gallant for her marvelously rich and compact sentences, and her meticulously rendered characters who reveal our flawed and complex human nature; Edward St. Aubyn for his elegance and sophisticated humor; and Mark Strand for his gift for depicting unlikely transformations. Here, too, are original pieces in which Prose explores the craft of writing: "On Clarity" and "What Makes a Short Story." Written with her sharp critical analysis, wit, and enthusiasm, What to Read and Why is a celebration of literature that will give readers a new appreciation for the power and beauty of the written word.
Download or read book The Casual Vacancy written by J. K. Rowling and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2012-09-27 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A big novel about a small town... When Barry Fairbrother dies in his early forties, the town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils...Pagford is not what it first seems. And the empty seat left by Barry on the parish council soon becomes the catalyst for the biggest war the town has yet seen. Who will triumph in an election fraught with passion, duplicity, and unexpected revelations? A big novel about a small town, The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling's first novel for adults. It is the work of a storyteller like no other.
