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Amazing Writers - A Short eBook
By Charles Margerison. 2011
Most people enjoy reading in some form or other, be it newspapers or a heavy novel. This unique short story…
collection from The Amazing People Club explores the lives and achievements of some of the world's most influential writers, including Charles Dickens. Find out why he wrote his books and what inspired the characters which would become famous. Get a unique insight into the amazing life of William Shakespeare and his relationship with Anne Hathaway, his dreams of becoming a playwright in London, and how he worked to produce great plays like Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. His story contrasts wonderfully with Mark Twain's, who has been deemed the 'father of american literature'. Get to know Twain as he travelled through the USA, from tiny towns in Missouri to the streets of New York. Each story comes to life through BioViews®. These are short biographical narratives, similar to interviews. They provide an easy way of learning about amazing people who made major contributions and changed our world.An Aesthetic Underground
By John Metcalf. 2014
"John Metcalf has written some of the very best stories ever published in this country."--Alice MunroThe Argus-eyed editor; the magisterial…
prose stylist; the waggish, inflammatory cultural critic; the mentor and iconoclast. John Metcalf is a literary legend whose memoir maps the underground he labored tirelessly to establish.Subject to Change
By Renee Rodin. 2010
Composed of autobiographical stories that sketch the resonant heights and depths of a memoir, Subject to Change is a series…
of portraits along the road of a life well-lived. These stories are articulate, intelligent, passionate records of how encounters with others have changed and shaped the humanity, character and community - the "subject" - of the writer.Recapture
By Erica Olsen. 2012
The Utah Canyons WildMall gives tourists exactly what they want. An archivist preserves a rare map of a vanished Lake…
Tahoe. The Grand Canyon can only be visited in replica form. These stories-lyrical, deadpan, surreal-blur the line between the natural world and the world we make.Praise for Recapture:A Library Journal Best Short Story Collection of the Year"Unsentimental stories that tell us what the American West looks like now and what we've lost; the Grand Canyon, for instance, can be seen only in replica after environmental catastrophe."-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal"Recapture is a living, breathing museum of natural wonders. With writing as spare as the landscape she evokes, Olsen wades through the detritus of the human experience and finds clarity there, and some magic, too."-ZYZZYVA"True to its name, Recapture grasps after lost loves, fading histories, and shifting landscapes to bring us an expertly curated series of human exhibits in an expansive, outdoor museum."-Lindsey Griffin, the museum of americana literary review"Erica Olsen gives us the dream life of the Southwest in this striking collection, a landscape told in language as spare and pungent and exacting as the desert itself. A swift and lovely debut from a writer of real gifts."-Kevin Canty, author of Where the Money Went"These sly, heartbreaking stories capture the modern West, where the past is ever-present and the future is already here."-Alison Baker, author of How I Came West, and Why I Stayed"Beneath their polished surfaces, Erica Olsen's stories are subversive, sometimes darkly funny, and always disquieting. When you set off on a hike in her universe, be prepared for surprises. You may find yourself exploring Utah-or Norway-or a surreal faux wilderness where rainbows are regularly scheduled and gnats are outlawed. Also, prepare to be exhilarated. This accomplished writer really knows her way through the tricky zone between truth and falsehood where art is made."-Susan Lowell Humphreys, author of Ganado Red"A sharp, wise new voice from the American West, Erica Olsen is the real thing. As wild as David Foster Wallace or George Saunders and as tender as James Salter or Alice Munro, Olsen's stories are hilarious, painful, and achingly lovely."-Amanda Eyre Ward, author of Close Your Eyes"Like all good narratives, Erica Olsen's "Grand Canyon II" suggests great consequence. The past is another country. The task of memory is impossible. No one exists and nothing ever happened. But somewhere in your brain, a beautiful lie is being spun..."-Sarah Manguso, author of The Guardians"Recapture is like a lost map of the backcountry, detailing the forgotten places where secrets shove up through the dust, pieces of lives demanding to be made whole. The territory is endlessly illuminating and constantly surprising, revealing a master storyteller at work."-Kim Todd, author of Tinkering with Eden: A Natural History of Exotic Species in AmericaGrind
By Mark Maynard. 2012
Convicts round up wild mustangs, a schizophrenic homeless man wins the jackpot and disappears, a truck driver with a child's…
mind spends his last hours in the embrace of a prostitute's photos-disparate and vivid, Mark Maynard's characters intersect in the new wild west of Reno, Nevada."Throughout the volume's eight tenuously linked tales, lives and fortune are lost, and the city of Reno emerges as a locus of shattered souls. Maynard's debut collection bursts with idiosyncratic characters...packs a strong emotional punch...is strangely entertaining."-Publishers Weekly"In Grind, Maynard reveals a world the Nevada tourism board would rather you didn't see...A debut collection of stories that perfectly captures the seediness, desperation and sense of loss permeating the hot desert world of Reno."-Shelf Awareness"Mark Maynard's Reno is so sleazily appealing, so filled with convict cowboys, wild horses, racing pilots, truckers, snow bums, eco-terrorists, tattoo conventions, pawnshops and jackpots that you emerge from reading Grind dazed by this author's empathy for neglected quarters of humanity. You feel gritty all over-and more alive."-Carolyn Cooke, author of Daughters of the Revolution"The characters in these stories are as beautiful and broken as the desert itself. Mark Maynard explores the stony truths of lost lives with an unflinching eye for detail, an insider's sense of the place and its people, and an honest compassion. The heartbreaks here are real, as are the moments of uncommon grace and hard-won redemption."-Kim Barnes, author of In the Kingdom of Men"Mark Maynard's Grind is chock full of men and women who are desperate with want and full of spirit. Pawnbrokers. Truckers. Casino shills. Prison inmates. They're all here, and they're all gloriously alive. This is prime American fiction-tough, generous, and open-eyed."-Alyson Hagy, author of Boleto"Grind is exactly what I like in a locally based book. Plenty of those characters who make a visit to the environs of Reno both an exciting potential and an illicit affair...This is a Northern Nevada book."-D. Brian Burghart, Reno News & ReviewHistorias conversadas
By Héctor Aguilar Camín. 2019
«Una obra de gran aliento narrativo que ha conquistado para la literatura mexicana actual arquetipos de la historia y la…
cultura del país.» Álvaro Ruiz Abreu En la novela Adiós a los padres, Héctor Aguilar Camín narra la historia de su familia, marcada por la ausencia de su padre. Para decir la verdad -ésa que está más allá de los datos-, el escritor sabía que sólo podía recurrir a la literatura. En este volumen de relatos replica la misma maniobra, pero llevándola al extremo: los quince cuentos de Historias conversadas pueden leerse como la autobiografía de un personaje de ficción que en cada capítulo se inventara, o se robara, una vida distinta. Estos cuentos, estas novelas condensadas, nos recuerdan que conversar es el origen primordial de la literatura. En cada uno, Héctor Aguilar Camín reproduce con maestría la lección de Sherezada: contar una historia dentro de una historia. Y así, mediante esta estrategia, pasa revista a las pasiones de toda una vida: la amistad, la familia, los reinos perdidos, el alcohol, el amor y el deseo, la imperfección de la historia... Historias conversadas es el volumen que completa la saga familiar de Héctor Aguilar Camín y el libro que lo confirma como uno de los mejores narradores mexicanos de nuestro tiempo.HA!: A Self-Murder Mystery
By Gordon Sheppard. 2003
On 15 March 1977, with his wife's consent, celebrated writer and former terrorist Hubert Aquin blew his brains out on…
the grounds of a Montreal convent school. Shocked by this self-murder, a filmmaker friend feels compelled to understand why Aquin killed himself - and discovers, at the heart of the tragedy, an unforgettable love story. A "documentary fiction" - a category which includes In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song - HA! is a seminal work that reinvents the audio-visual revolution of the last century. Interweaving photographs, documents, and images with testimony from Aquin's friends and contemporaries, Aquin himself, and the writers and artists who influenced him, this intriguing novel takes the reader on a Joycean tour of a metropolis in the midst of political and cultural turmoil.Beauty and Sadness
By Andre Alexis. 2010
Forgotten Fitzgerald: Echoes of a Lost America
By F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sarah Churchwell. 2014
While F. Scott Fitzgerald was writing the novels we remember him for today, he was also publishing short stories in…
popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. Although many of Fitzgerald's short stories are celebrated and anthologised today, more remain out of print than would be expected for a writer of his stature. Some of these forgotten stories deserve to be rediscovered by the many readers who love Fitzgerald's work. Sarah Churchwell, author of the acclaimed Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby, has selected twelve forgotten stories from throughout Fitzgerald's career that refract, in different ways, his most familiar motifs: the changing meanings of America in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the desire to reconcile rich and poor through a romantic search for glamour, hope and wonder. Each of these stories offers a riff on the theme of America, a world we have lost, but can hear echoes of in Fitzgerald's characteristically rich, vivid prose.The Tangle
By Justin Robertson. 2021
'A writer of fierce and vivid imagination. The Tangle, like Holdstock's classic Mythago Wood and Catlin's The Voorh, taps the…
deep resonances of the wild wood in the English soul, revering even the stones as living minds, possessed of souls and ancient memories. Visceral stuff from this promising new star of dark fantasy' Michael MoorcockJustin Robertson's debut novel is a trans- dimensional trip into the mysterious knot of nature; a journey into the 'brilliant darkness' where the timeless divine spirit of the 'Tangle' weaves its spell and all mankind's hubris is rendered insignificant by the radically non-human force of phantom ecology. Salvation, revelation and a terrible reckoning dwell in the ancient roots ...A time travelling account of what occurs when unknowable frontiers are breached and humanity finds itself, once again, lost in the woods, THE TANGLE invites us into a grotesque world of eco-horror, echoing with the spirit of writers such as Saki, Ballard, M R James, Ursula Le Guin, Brian Catling and Thomas Ligotti.The Henry Miller Reader (Essay Index Reprint Ser.)
By Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell. 1969
A collection of works spanning the entire career of great 20th-century American writer Henry Miller, edited and introduced by Lawrence…
Durrell. In 1958, when Henry Miller was elected to membership in the American Institute of Arts and Letters, the citation described him as: "The veteran author of many books whose originality and richness of technique are matched by the variety and daring of his subject matter. His boldness of approach and intense curiosity concerning man and nature are unequalled in the prose literature of our times." It is most fitting that this anthology of "the best" of Henry Miller should have been assembled by one of the first among Miller’s contemporaries to recognize his genius, the eminent British writer Lawrence Durrell. Drawing material from a dozen different books Durrell has traced the main line and principal themes of the "single, endless autobiography" which is Henry Miller’s life work. "I suspect," writes Durrell in his Introduction, "that Miller’s final place will be among those towering anomalies of authorship like Whitman or Blake who have left us, not simply works of art, but a corpus of ideas which motivate and influence a whole cultural pattern." Earlier, H. L. Mencken had said, "his is one of the most beautiful prose styles today," and the late Sir Herbert Read had written that "what makes Miller distinctive among modern writers is his ability to combine, without confusion, the aesthetic and prophetic functions." Included are stories, "portraits" of persons and places, philosophical essays, and aphorisms. For each selection Miller himself prepared a brief commentary which fits the piece into its place in his life story. This framework is supplemented by a chronology from Miller’s birth in 1891 up to the spring of 1959, a bibliography, and, as an appendix, an open letter to the Supreme Court of Norway written in protest of the ban on Sexus, a part of which appears in this volume.Devotion
By Patti Smith. 2017
From the renowned artist and author Patti Smith, an inspired exploration of the nature of creative invention A work of…
creative brilliance may seem like magic—its source a mystery, its impact unexpectedly stirring. How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audience never met? In this groundbreaking book, one of our culture’s beloved artists offers a detailed account of her own creative process, inspirations, and unexpected connections. Patti Smith first presents an original and beautifully crafted tale of obsession—a young skater who lives for her art, a possessive collector who ruthlessly seeks his prize, a relationship forged of need both craven and exalted. She then takes us on a second journey, exploring the sources of her story. We travel through the South of France to Camus’s house, and visit the garden of the great publisher Gallimard where the ghosts of Mishima, Nabokov, and Genet mingle. Smith tracks down Simone Weil’s grave in a lonely cemetery, hours from London, and winds through the nameless Paris streets of Patrick Modiano’s novels. Whether writing in a café or a train, Smith generously opens her notebooks and lets us glimpse the alchemy of her art and craft in this arresting and original book on writing. The Why I Write series is based on the Windham-Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University.