Student BookShop
Featuring Books about Writing and Reading
Toxic
Feedback by Joni B. Cole
All writers have stories of how some teacher, workshop participant, friend, or spouse gave them commentary that undermined their confidence and their writing. This "toxic feedback" has tainted feedback's reputation as a whole, causing too many writers to avoid or mismanage this valuable resource. In the first book to focus on this vital but delicate dynamic, Joni B. Cole applies first-person experience, real-life teaching examples, and her own unique ability to entertain while reaffirming the many merits of feedback. Cole shows writers how to use feedback to energize and inform their writing at every stage of the process. For feedback providers, she delivers insights into constructive criticism and the difference between being heard and being obnoxious. Finally, she offers advice to workshops and critique groups on how to thrive in this collective experience. In addition, established writers including Julia Alvarez, Khaled Hosseini, Ted Kooser, Gregory Maguire, Jodi Picoult, and others share their own feedback stories—from useful to inspiring to deranged—underscoring Cole's message that feedback plays a critical role in every writer's success. Through a mixture of instruction, anecdotes, and moral support, Cole manages to detoxify the feedback process with humor and without laying blame, inspiring both sides of the interaction to make the most of this powerful resource. <buy now>
Reading
like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write
Them by Francine Prose
Long before there were
creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write?
By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine
Prose. In Reading Like a Writer, Prose invites you to sit by her side and
take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the
work of the very best writers-Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens,
Woolf, Chekhov-and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in
the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking
paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization
in George Eliot's Middlemarch. She looks to John Le Carré for a lesson in how to
advance plot through dialogue, to Flannery O'Connor for the cunning use of the
telling detail, and to James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield for clever examples
of how to employ gesture to create character. She cautions readers to slow down
and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted.
Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire
readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.
<buy now>
The
Literary Animal:
Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, edited by Jonathan Gottschall
In recent years, articles in major periodicals from the New York Times Magazine to the Times Literary Supplement have heralded the arrival of a new school of literary studies that promises-or threatens-to profoundly shift the current paradigm. This revolutionary approach, known as Darwinian literary studies, is based on a few simple premises: evolution has produced a universal landscape of the human mind that can be scientifically mapped; these universal tendencies are reflected in the composition, reception, and interpretation of literary works; and an understanding of the evolutionary foundations of human behavior, psychology, and culture will enable literary scholars to gain powerful new perspectives on the elements, form, and nature of storytelling. The goal of this book is to overcome some of the widespread misunderstandings about the meaning of a Darwinian approach to the human mind generally, and literature specifically. The volume brings together scholars from the forefront of the new field of evolutionary literary analysis-both literary analysts who have made evolution their explanatory framework and evolutionist scientists who have taken a serious interest in literature-to show how the human propensity for literature and art can be properly framed as a true evolutionary problem. Their work is an important step toward the long-prophesied synthesis of the humanities and what Steven Pinker calls "the new sciences of human nature." <buy now>
Literary
Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature by Joseph Carroll
In Literary Darwinism, Carroll presents a comprehensive
survey of this new movement with a collection of his most important previously
published work, along with three new essays. The essays and reviews give
commentary on all the major contributors to the field, situate the field as a
whole in relation to historical trends and contemporary schools, provide
Darwinist readings of major literary texts such as Pride and Prejudice and Tess
of the d'Urbervilles, and analyze literary Darwinism in relation to the
affiliated fields of evolutionary metaphysics, cognitive rhetoric, and
ecocriticism. Collecting the essays in a single volume will provide a central
point of reference for scholars interested in consulting what the "foremost
practitioner" (New York Times) of Darwinian literary criticism has to say about
his field.
<buy now>
Thirteen
Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley
Jane Smiley explores - as
no novelist has before - the unparalleled intimacy of reading, why a novel
succeeds (or doesn't), and how the novel has changed over time. She describes a
novelist as "right on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone
who knows nothing," yet whose "job and ambition is to develop a theory of how it
feels to be alive."" "Smiley invites us behind the scenes of novel-writing,
sharing her own habits and spilling the secrets of her craft. She walks us
step-by-step through the publication of her most recent novel, Good Faith, and,
in two chapters on how to write "a novel of your own," offers advice to aspiring
writers." And in the conclusion, Smiley considers individually the one hundred
books she read, from Don Quixote to Lolita to Atonement, presenting her own
insights and often controversial opinions. Thirteen Ways is essential reading
for anyone who has ever escaped into the pages of a novel or, for that matter,
wanted to write one.
<buy now>
The Seven
Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker
This book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales, via the plays and novels of great literature to the popular movies and TV soap operas of today, it shows that there are seven archetypal themes which recur throughout every kind of storytelling." But this is only the prelude to an investigation into how and why we are 'programmed' to imagine stories in these ways, and how they relate to the inmost patterns of human psychology. Drawing on a vast array of examples, from Proust to detective stories, from the Marquis de Sade to E.T., Christopher Booker then leads us through the extraordinary changes in the nature of storytelling over the past 200 years, and why so many stories have 'lost the plot' by losing touch with their underlying archetypal purpose. <buy now>
Bound
to Please: An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education: Essays on Great
Writers and their Books by Michael Dirda
Opening with an
impassioned critique of modern reading habits, Michael Dirda presents many of
the great, and idiosyncratic, writers he loves most." "Bound to Please starts
with ancient classics - Herodotus, the Bible, The Arabian Nights - and ends with
a concisely annotated list of groundbreaking science-fiction novels. In between
Dirda writes about, well, everything: Renaissance intellectual history and
Russian literary theory, P. G. Wodehouse and spaghetti westerns, the celebrated
modern masters (Colette, Nabokov, Borges) and the somewhat neglected ones
(Ronald Firbank, Djuna Barnes, Flann O'Brien, Henry Green). Who other than
Michael Dirda has detailed the pleasures awaiting readers when they pick up - to
choose just one letter of the alphabet - Samuel Pepys, Alexander Pushkin, Marcel
Proust, Fernando Pessoa, Georges Perec, Thomas Pynchon, Annie Proulx, Philip
Pullman, and Terry Pratchett?" Many of Dirda's pieces can serve as concise
introductions to neglected giants of the past, whether eminences like Rabelais,
Victor Hugo, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Machado de Assis, and William Morris or
twentieth-century masters such as Joseph Roth, Isaac Babel, Marguerite Yourcenar,
and Italo Svevo.
<buy now>
The
Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates
In the Faith of a Writer, Oates discusses the subjects most important to the narrative craft, touching on topic such as inspiration, memory, self criticism and the "the unique power of the unconsious." On a more personal note, she speaks of childhood inspirations, offers advice in young writers, and discuss the wildly varying states of mind of a writer at work. Oates also plays homage to those she calls her "significant precessors" and discusses the importance of reading in the life of a writer. <buy now>
Don Quixote
(Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations) edited by Harold Bloom
Table of Contents: Glosses on Don Quixote / Miguel de Unamuno -- Voyage with Don Quixote / Thomas Mann -- The truth about Sancho Panza / Franz Kafka -- The enchanted Dulcinea / Erich Auerbach -- The ironic hero : some reflections on Don Quixote / W.H. Auden -- Cruelty and mystification / Vladimir Nabokov -- Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote / Jorge Luis Borges -- Don Quixote's profession / Mark Van Doren -- The example of Cervantes / Harry Levin -- The hero / Josâe Ortega y Gasset -- Cervantes : the play of the world / Harold Bloom. <buy now>
Lectures on Don Quixote by Vladimir Nabokov
A fastidiously shaped series of lectures based on a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the Spanish classic. Rejecting the common interpretation of Don Quixote as a warm satire, Nabokov perceives the work as a catalog of cruelty through which the gaunt knight passes. Edited and with a preface by Fredson Bowers; photographs. <buy now>
The
Writer on Her Work edited by Janet Sternburg
Published to high praise this
was the first anthology to celebrate the diversity of women who write. Seventeen
novelists, poets, and writers of nonfiction explore how they became writers, why
they write, and what it means to be a woman and a writer. <<buy now>>
Fingerpainting
on the Moon: Writing and Creativity as a Path to Freedom by Peter Levitt
As whimsical as it is profound, Peter Levitt's book shows how creativity is our birthright, and tells us that we need only dip into the well that lies deep within us and our authentic selves will come pouring forth. Whether we want to write, draw, or fall in love, this book is a journey that takes us from the first step, the ability to sit in silence, to the second, being willing to take a risk, and finally, to reaching paradise, which is here and now. Along the way, Levitt teaches techniques such as ''soft focus'' and ''naked mind'' to help awaken creativity, and, throughout the book, Levitt interweaves teachings from the world's religions with writing exercises to inspire and direct. For fans of Julia Cameron, Natalie Goldberg, and Anne Lamott, Fingerpainting on the Moon tells us that everything is permitted in the imagination, and one creative act can lead to a lifetime of fulfillment. Writers, artists, and spiritual seekers of all kinds will find fresh and lasting insight. <<buy now>>
Tell It
Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne
Paola
In Tell It Slant, Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola introduce, explore, and teach the art of writing creative nonfiction - from the memoir to investigative reporting to the lyric essay. Intensive writing instruction, an anthology featuring a range of contemporary and canonical authors, and an abundance of exercises all help students to generate new material and shape it in innovative ways.
Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers
by Carolyn See
As
Carolyn See says, writing guides are like preachers on Sunday - there may be a
lot of them, but you can't have too many and there's always an audience of the
faithful. And while Making a Literary Life is ostensibly a book that teaches you
how to write, it really teaches you how to make your interior life into your
exterior life, how to find and join that community of like-minded souls you're
sure is out there somewhere.
Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays
by David Lodge
Human Consciousness, long the province of literature, has lately come in for a remapping - even rediscovery - by the natural sciences, driven by developments in Artificial Intelligence, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. As the richest record we have of human consciousness, literature, David Lodge suggests, may offer a kind of understanding that is complementary, not opposed, to scientific knowledge. Writing with characteristic wit and brio, and employing the insight and acumen of a skilled novelist and critic, Lodge here explores the representation of human consciousness in fiction (mainly English and American) in light of recent investigations in the sciences. <<buy now>>
Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art
by Lewis Hyde
Lewis Hyde's ambitious and captivating Trickster Makes This World brings to life the playful and disruptive side of the human imagination as it is embodied in the trickster mythology. Most at home on the road or at the twilight edge of town, tricksters are consummate boundary-crossers, slipping through keyholes, breaching walls, subverting defense systems. Always out to satisfy their inordinate appetites, lying, cheating, and stealing, tricksters are a great bother to have around, but paradoxically they are also indispensable culture heroes. In North America, Coyote taught the race how to dress, sing, and shoot arrows. In West Africa, Eshu discovered the art of divination so that suffering humans might know the purposes of heaven. In Greece, Hermes the Thief invented the art of sacrifice, the trick of making fire, and even language itself. Hyde revisits these old stories, then holds them up against the life and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frederick Douglass, and others. <<buy now>>
Mr. Wilson's
Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler
In the non-Aristotelian, non-Euclidean, non-Newtonian space between the walls of the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles exist bats that can fly through lead barriers, spore-ingesting pronged ants, elaborate theories of memory, and a host of other off-kilter scientific oddities that challenge the traditional notions of truth and fiction.
Forbidden
Knowledge : A Brilliant Exploration of the Dark Side of Human Ingenuity and
Imagination by Roger Shattuck
An intellectual tour-de-force, Forbidden Knowledge is a study of the ethics of literary and scientific inquiry. Shattuck first approaches his subject indirectly, conducting an engaging tour of Western literature: Adam and Eve, Prometheus, Milton's Paradise Lost, Goethe's Faust, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. He then uses these tales to address the moral questions raised by mankind's tendency to search for dangerous knowledge.
The Gift :
Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property by Lewis Hyde
An inquiry into the place of creativity in our market-oriented society. Starting with the premise that the work of art is a gift and not a commodity, the book ranges across anthropology, literature, economics, and psychology to show how the "commerce of the creative spirit" functions in the lives of artists and in the culture as a whole.
The
Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
In August 1992, W.G. Sebald set off on a walking tour of Suffolk, one of England's least populated and most striking counties. A long project--presumably The Emigrants, his great anatomy of exile, loss, and identity--had left him spent. Initially his tour was a carefree one. Soon, however, Sebald was to happen upon "traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past," in a series of encounters so intense that a year later he found himself in a state of collapse in a Norwich hospital. The Rings of Saturn is his record of these travels, a phantasmagoria of fragments and memories, fraught with dizzying knowledge and desperation and shadowed by mortality.
Finding
a Form by William Gass
William H. Gass is embattled. . . . And in Finding a Form he confronts the conundrum of the writer that he has faced in previous essays: the word is sacred. Though there are no longer sacred texts; "writing puts the writer in illusory command of the world, empowers someone otherwise powerless, but with a power no more pointed than a pencil." . . .Against the odds, William Gass, a tortured man in the attic, has empowered himself to write scripture in an unredemptive time.
Into the
Looking-Glass Wood : Essays on Books, Reading, and the World by Alberto Manguel
This author is above all an enthusiast for the pleasure of books, and his
enthusiasm, as displayed in this lively collection, is catching...All are
permeated by his playful wit and love of paradox. One book leads to another,
some familiar, some not, in this superb collection that adds up to much more
than the sum of its parts.
Six
Walks in the Fictional Woods by Umberto Eco
In this exhilarating book, companion and guide Umberto Eco--bestselling author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum--explores the intricacies of fictional form and method. Eco makes readers his collaborators in the creation of his text and the investigation of fiction's mechanisms.
A
History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book - that string of confused, alien ciphers - shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Noted essayist Alberto Manguel moves from this essential moment to explore the 6000-year-old conversation between words and that magician without whom the book would be a lifeless object: the reader. Manguel lingers over reading as seduction, as rebellion, as obsession, and goes on to trace the never-before-told story of the reader's progress from clay tablet to scroll, codex to CD-ROM.
How To Read
and Why by Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom's urgency in How to Read and Why may have much to do with his age. He brackets his combative, inspiring manual with the news that he is nearing 70 and hasn't time for the mediocre. (One doubts that he ever did.) Nor will he countenance such fashionable notions as the death of the author or abide "the vagaries of our current counter-Puritanism" let alone "ideological cheerleading." Successively exploring the short story, poetry, the novel, and drama, Bloom illuminates both the how and why of his title and points us in all the right directions: toward the Romantics because they "startle us out of our sleep-of-death into a more capacious sense of life"; toward Austen, James, Proust; toward Thomas Mann, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy; toward Cervantes and Shakespeare (but of course!), Ibsen and Oscar Wilde. <<buy now>>
Words
and Rules: The Ingredients of Language by Stephen Pinker
How does language work, and how do we learn to speak? Why do languages change over time, and why do they have so many quirks and irregularities? In this original and totally entertaining book written in the same engaging style that illuminated his bestselling classics, The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker explores the profound mysteries of language. By picking a deceptively simple phenomenon—regular and irregular verbs—Pinker connects an astonishing array of topics in the sciences and the humanities: the history of languages; the theories of Noam Chomsky and his critics; the attempts to create language using computer simulations of neural networks; what there is to learn from children's grammatical "mistakes"; the latest techniques in identifying genes and imaging the brain; and major ideas in the history of Western philosophy. He makes sense of all this with the help of a single, powerful idea: that language comprises a mental dictionary of memorized words and a mental grammer of creative rules. His theory extends beyond language and offers insight in the very nature of the human mind.
Forest
for the Trees: An Editor's Advice to Writers by Betsy Lerner
Who knows the mind, the motives, and the mistakes of a writer better than his or her editor? Betsy Lerner-in addition to being a prize-winning poet and an author's agent-has spent years editing for major New York houses. In this unusual and compelling book, she shares the wisdom and insights she's gained from that work. Far more than a how-to manual, this book offers inspiration, inside views, and a colorful, anecdotal look at the publishing world-all delivered in the smart, funny, unpretentious voice that has helped to make Lerner one of the most prominent names in the business. "A quirky, informal, engaging guide." (Publishers Weekly)
Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life by Jerome Bruner
"Stories - whether chronicles of truth or fancies of fiction - pervade our world and shape our understanding of it. They inform our basic impressions of reality and impose structure on our lives. Yet so intrinsic is our grasp of narrative - we all tell stories and like to hear them - that we find it hard to question its purpose or explain its effects." In Making Stories, the psychologist and educator Jerome Bruner inquires into this elusive yet fundamental aspect of human nature and asks how we use it to make sense of our lives. He proposes challenging new ways to think about narrative: to understand how we tell our stories, to see how we use them to create a sense of self and interpret other people's lives, to learn how literature alters the very idea of what a story is and how law teaches us about our expectations of narrative. The result is a masterful, provocative synthesis of anthropology, psychology, literature, law, and philosophy. <<buy now>>
Book Business: Publishing
Past, Present, and Future
by Jason Epstein
Jason Epstein has led arguably the most creative career in book publishing during the past half-century. He founded Anchor Books and thereby launched the quality paperback revolution, cofounded the New York Review of Books, and created the Library of America, the prestigious publisher of American classics, and The Reader's Catalog, the precursor of online bookselling. In this book he discusses the severe crisis facing the book business today -- a crisis that affects writers and readers as well as publishers -- and looks ahead to the radically transformed industry that will revolutionize the idea of the book as profoundly as the introduction of movable type did five centuries ago.
The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read by Andre Schiffrin
Part-memoir, part-history, The Business of Books is an irascible, acute and often passionate account of the collapsing standards of contemporary book publishing. It has appeared throughout the world in seventeen different editions.
Don Quixote Meets the Mob: The Craft of Fiction and the Art of Life
by Susan Taylor Chehak
This
unique and appealing approach to the craft of fiction writing reinvents
thewriting method and breathes new life into the writing instructional. Chehak
is a facile and entertaining storyteller who uses personal anecdote to find in
practicing the art of fiction deep and moving lessons for engaging in the art of
life.
"This is not just a writing text, it is an homage to writing, to how the real
and the imagined come together, to how ideas start in one place only to end in
another form, in another story for another day." -- Writer's Digest
The
Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers
by Elizabeth Benedict
Elizabeth Benedict is here to help you craft compelling sex scenes that are just right for your fiction - whether your story calls for an encounter that sizzles or one that fizzles. Benedict has explored sensuality in her own novels with great success. So in The Joy of Writing Sex, she covers all the issues head-on - from how to handle creating fiction your grandparents might not approve of, to writing about sex in the age of AIDS. You'll learn to construct scenes that hinge not on the mechanics of sex, but on the freshness of characters, dialogue, mood, plot - all the ingredients of powerful fiction. Throughout, you'll benefit from the voices and experiences of some of today's most prestigious writers - among them, John Updike, Dorothy Allison, Russell Banks, Joyce Carol Oates, Carol Shields and Alan Hollinghurst. For absolute clarity, Benedict uses examples from the finest contemporary fiction to illustrate her points. She takes care to examine each excerpt in context of the whole piece, to help you develop the skills you need to objectively analyze your own work. In the final chapter, you'll find exercises to help you master elements such as dialogue, setting and tone. <<buy now>>
Writer
Tells All: Insider Secrets to Getting Your Book Published
by Robert Masello
In this frank, funny, and highly informative book, professional writer Robert Masello takes you through the whole publication process, step-by-step, from the moment of inspiration to publication day and beyond.
Whether you're writing a novel or nonfiction, a murder mystery or a memoir, Masello knows exactly what you're going through. He's not an editor, an agent, or a publisher -- he's working writer, the author of thirteen previous books. He knows the doubts and fears, the questions and quandaries that every new author experiences -- and he also knows how to overcome them.
Writer Tells All gives you everything you need to know to get your own book successfully written, published, and promoted. Masello spares no one -- least of all himself -- in this absolutely candid, and often hilarious, account of how the book business really works.