The land mine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces back together. Now, it's your turn. Jump!"Zest. Gusto. Curiosity. These are the qualities every writer must have, as well as a spirit of adventure. In this exuberant book, the incomparable Ray Bradbury shares the wisdom, experience, and excitement of a lifetime of writing. Here are practical tips on the art of writing from a master of the craft—everything from finding original ideas to developing your own voice and style—as well as the inside story of Bradbury's own remarkable career as a prolific author of novels, stories, poems, films, and plays.Zen in the Art of Writing is more than just a how-to manual for the would-be writer: it is a celebration of the act of writing itself that will delight, impassion, and inspire the writer in you. Bradbury encourages us to follow the unique path of our instincts and enthusiasms to the place where our inner genius dwells, and he shows that success as a writer depends on how well you know one subject: your own life.

    Unknown to most of them, however, Szymborska also worked for several decades as a columnist, reviewing a wide variety of books under the unassuming title "Nonrequired Reading."As readers of her poems would expect, the short prose pieces collected here are anything but ordinary. Reflecting the author's own eclectic tastes and interests, the pretexts for these ruminations range from books on wallpapering, cooking, gardening, and yoga, to more lofty volumes on opera and world literature. Unpretentious yet incisive, these charming pieces are on a par with Szymborska's finest lyrics, tackling the same large and small questions with a wonderful curiosity.

    Through Truman Capote's eyes and artistry we visit such places as Hatti, Tangier, Hollywood, Paris, Manhattan, Italy and Brooklyn, we encounter such figures as Isak Dinesen, Mae West, Louis Armstrong, Colette, Humphrey Bogart, Ezra Pound, Marilyn Monroe, and Marlon Brando, and we observe the evolution of Capote from a young man in the golden glow of early success to a renowned author viewing his life, work, world and the creation of his last incomplete novel -- Answered Prayers. Reprinted in its entirety is The Muses Are Heard, Capote's fascinating, excruciatingly funny account of the "Porgy and Bess" touring company's visit to the Soviet Union.Every page is stamped with the unique sensibility and inimitable style of Truman Capote and provides vivid evidence of why Norman Mailer has termed him "the most perfect writer of a generation."

    . . not only a poetics of reading . . . but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading . . . . Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and pieces here do come together, determined to affirm the pleasure we must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge." --Richard Howard

    This book is a record of those seminars, which took the form of informal discussions between Borges, Norman Thomas di Giovanni--his editor and translator, Frank MacShane--then head of the writing program at Columbia, and the students. Borges's prose, poetry, and translations are handled separately and the book is divided accordingly.The prose seminar is based on a line-by-line discussion of one of Borges's most distinctive stories, "The End of the Duel." Borges explains how he wrote the story, his use of local knowledge, and his characteristic method of relating violent events in a precise and ironic way. This close analysis of his methods produces some illuminating observations on the role of the writer and the function of literature.The poetry section begins with some general remarks by Borges on the need for form and structure and moves into a revealing analysis of four of his poems. The final section, on translation, is an exciting discussion of how the art and culture of one country can be "translated" into the language of another.This book is a tribute to the brilliant craftsmanship of one of South America's--indeed, the world's--most distinguished writers and provides valuable insight into his inspiration and his method.

    

    and includes "Mureau"-composed from the writings of Henry David Thoreau.

    

    In this collection of interviews, articles, and editorials, Vladimir Nabokov ranges over his life, art, education, politics, literature, movies, and modern times, among other subjects. Strong Opinions offers his trenchant, witty, and always engaging views on everything from the Russian Revolution to the correct pronunciation of Lolita.

    Murray's subject is the previously unacknowledged kinship between fiction and the blues. Both, he argues, are virtuoso performances that impart information, wisdom, and moral guidance to their audiences; both place a high value on improvisation; and both fiction and the blues create a delicate balance between the holy and the obscene, essential human values and cosmic absurdity. Encompassing artists from Ernest Hemingway to Duke Ellington, and from Thomas Mann to Richard Wright, The Hero and the Blues pays homage to a new black aesthetic.

    His early activism in the Scottish labor movement; his pioneering socialism in Ireland; his involvement in the American Labor movement; his activity as a union organizer back in Ireland; his revolutionary stand against WWI; & his ultimately fatal leadership of the 1916 uprising for Irish independence, all point to a crucial figure in the development of the workers' movement during one of its most intriguing phases. A tireless political worker & a prolific writer, Connolly's thinking on nationalism & imperialism had an influence on Lenin. He's regarded by many as one of the founders of 20th-century Irish nationalism. This book of his writings draws together some of his most representative work.

    

    As the authors say in their preface: "History records the names and misdeeds of some perfectly awful people. The list, alas, is all too long. We present some of the worst of them, some famous and some obscure."

    

    A stunning example of poetic questioning.

    O'Rourke, Terry Southern, Anne Beatts, Doug Kenney and Brian McConnachie could have possibly created. Includes a pullout, 4-color, National Lampoon World Map and artwork from Edward Gorey, Bruce McCall and Rick Meyerwitz

    

    "[Connolly] has the wonderful capacity for enthusiasm, for exciting in us his own unflagging joy in the presence of genius"(New Yorker). Index.

    This revised edition contains new chapters on the effects of the development of the Communist regimes in China, Cuba, and North Vietnam.

    

    

    Gadamer's commentaries on Celan's work are explicitly meant for a general audience, and they are further testimony to Celan's growing importance in world literature since the Second World War. Celan's poetry has attracted the attention of many well-known figures, including Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Edmond Jabes, Otto Poggeler, and George Steiner. As Steiner has said, "It will take a long time for our sensibilities to apprehend poetry of these dimensions and this radicality." Gadamer's commentaries will help readers to listen to Celan's poetry, and to become acquainted with his only book-length commentary on a poet, using the best example of Gadamer's thinking on the relationship of philosophy and poetry. This book also contains a translation of Who Am I and Who Are You?, the centerpeice of Gadamer's most important philosophical project since the publication of Truth and Method (1960).

    E. Housman, or as introductions to editions of the classical Greek writers, the Protestant mystics, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kierkegaard, Tennyson, Grimm and Andersen, Poe, G. K. Chesterton, Paul Valéry, and others.  Throughout, these prose pieces reveal the same wit and intelligence—as well as the vision—that sparked the brilliance of Auden's poetry.