African American Studies. Latino/Latina Studies. "Up jumps the boogie. That's almost all one needs to say. Murillo is headbreakingly brilliant. I didn't have a favorite poet for this year: Now I do. But with this kind of verve and intelligence and ferocity Murillo just might be a favorite for many years to come."—Junot Diaz"The feel of now lives in John Murillo's UP JUMP THE BOOGIE, but it's tempered by bows to the tradition of soulful music and oral poetry. The lived dimensions embodied in this collection say that here's an earned street knowledge and a measured intellectual inquiry that dare to live side by side, in one unique voice. The pages of UP JUMP THE BOOGIE breathe and sing; the tributes and cultural nods are heartfelt, and in these honest poems no one gets off the hook."—Yusef Komunyakaa

    Composed of autobiographical essays, cultural commentary, book reviews, and introductory pieces written for great works of literature, this is the award-winning author's first book-length nonfiction publication in twenty years. Arranged chronologically, these writings display the development of Atwood's worldview as the world around her changes. Included are the Booker Prize–winning author's reviews of books by John Updike, Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, and others, as well as essays in which she remembers herself reading Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse at age nineteen, and discusses the influence of George Orwell's 1984 on the writing of The Handmaid's Tale. Atwood's New York Times Book Review piece that helped make Orhan Pamuk's Snow a bestseller can be found here, as well as a look back on a family trip to Afghanistan just before the Soviet invasion, and her "Letter to America," written after September 11, 2001. The insightful and memorable pieces in this book serve as a testament to Atwood's career, reminding readers why she is one of the most esteemed writers of our time.

    Fusing family memoir with a meditation on creative block, depression, solitude, class, place and the intractable politics of our present moment, Dan Fox draws upon his experiences as a writer to consider the role that fallow periods and states of impasse play in art and life. LIMBO is an essay about getting by when you can't get along, employing a cast of artists, exiles, ghosts, hermits and sailors - including the author's older brother who, in 1985, left England for good to sail the world - to reflect on the creative, emotional and political consequences of being stuck, and how these are also crucial to our understanding of inspiration, flow and productivity. From Thomas Aquinas to radical behavioural experiments, from creative constraints to the social horrors of THE TWILIGHT ZONE and Get Out's SUNKEN PLACE, LIMBO argues that there can be no growth without stagnancy, no movement without inactivity, and no progress without refusal.

    They have the pedal pressed to the floor when they shouldn't have gotten in the ride at all, sort of speak. In "Slow Your Prose: 25 Tips On How New Authors Can Improve Their Craft," we go back to the basics.Showing vs. telling, passive/active voice, point-of-views ... many writers confuse these key elements for writing a good story. Before rushing a book to market, it's more important to write the best book possible first. But why do so many authors skip this step? As a bonus, you'll find three proven query letters that have led to deals with a literary agent, a magazine and popular anthology by a New York Times best-selling author.

    When it became a surprise blockbuster, studios began to trust him with larger budgets and the whims of his expansive imagination. Mixing gothic horror, black comedy, and oddball whimsy, Burton's movies veer from childlike enchantment to morbid melancholy, often with the same frame.His beautifully designed and highly stylized films-including Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Big Fish, Sleepy Hollow, and Ed Wood-are idiosyncratic, personal visions that have found commercial success. In Tim Burton: Interviews, the director discusses how animation and art design affect his work, how old horror films have deeply influenced his psyche, why so many of his protagonists are outcasts, and how he's managed to make personal films within the Hollywood system. He gives tribute to writers he's worked with, his favorite actors-including Johnny Depp and Vincent Price-and talks enthusiastically about pulp horror fiction and the works of Edgar Allan Poe.These interviews show his progression from an inarticulate young director to a contemplative and dry-witted artist over the course of twenty years. In later interviews, he opens up about being in therapy and how his childhood fantasies still affect his art. Tim Burton: Interviews reveals a man who has managed to thrive inside Hollywood while maintaining the distinctive quirks of an independent filmmaker.Kristian Fraga, New York City, wrote and directed the award-winning PBS documentary The Inside Reel: Digital Filmmaking. He is a founding partner of Sirk Productions, LLC, a Manhattan-based film and television production company.

    Greene, who recently launched World Science U, which offers free online science courses, explains what it is that's so "elegant" about string theory while lamenting the possible limits of what dogs (and by implication humans) can ever hope to understand about the universe. The interview was conducted by Rivka Galchen, an acclaimed fiction writer and journalist, named by The New Yorker as one of 20 Writers Under 40. Cover design by Adil Dara Kim.

    Bernie Schein was his best friend from the time they met in a high-school pickup basketball game in Beaufort, South Carolina, until Conroy’s death in 2016. Both were popular athletes but also outsiders as a Jew and a Catholic military brat in the small-town Bible-Belt South, and they bonded. Wise ass and smart aleck, loudmouths both, they shared an ebullient sense of humor and romanticism, were mesmerized by the highbrow and reveled in the low, and would sacrifice entire evenings and afternoons to endless conversation. As young teachers in the Beaufort area and later in Atlanta, they were activists in the civil rights struggle and against institutional racism and bigotry. Bernie knew intimately the private family story of the Conroys and his friend’s difficult relationship with his Marine Corps colonel father that Pat would draw on repeatedly in his fiction. A love letter and homage, and a way to share the Pat he knew, this book collects Bernie’s cherished memories about the gregarious, welcoming, larger-than-life man who remained his best friend, even during the years they didn’t speak. It offers a trove of insights and anecdotes that will be treasured by Pat Conroy’s many devoted fans.

     By the time you finish this book you'll be able to do everything from checking your grammar, to creating an infographic, to driving free traffic to your blog or website, all using free tools, sites and downloads. The book contains links to all resources mentioned. A handy little reference guide you'll keep on your Kindle or other device to refer back to again and again.

    A cornucopiac vocabulary is married to a strict economy of expression; an offbeat curiosity is married to the courage of difficult witnessing. . . .”—Albert Goldbarth “Purpura's prose is a system of delicate shocks—leaps and connections and syncopated revelations, all in the service of the spirit negotiating the truth of its experience.”—Sven Birkerts Lia Purpura's daring new book of lyric essays, On Looking, is concerned with the aesthetics and ethics of seeing. In these elegantly wrought meditations, patterns and meanings emerge from confusion, the commonplace grows strange and complex, beauty reveals its flaws, and even the most repulsive object turns gorgeous. Purpura's hand is clearly guided by poetry and behaves unpredictably, weaving together, in one lit instance, sugar eggs, binoculars, and Emerson's words: "I like the silent church before the sermon begins." In "Autopsy Report," Purpura takes an intimate look at the ruin of our bodies after death, examining the "dripping fruits" of organs and the spine in its "wet, red earth." A similar reverence is held for the alien jellyfish in "On Form," where she notes that "in order to see their particular beauty...we have to suspend our fear, we have to love contradiction." Her essays question art and its responses as well as its responsibilities, challenge familiar and familial relationships, and alter the borders between the violent and the luminous, the harrowing and the sensual.  Above all, Purpura's essays are a call to notice. She is writer-as-telescope, kaleidoscope, microscope, and mirror.  As she says: "By seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another, and rare." This is, indeed, a rare and startling treasure of a book.Lia Purpura is the author of Increase (essays), Stone Sky Lifting (poems), The Brighter the Veil (poems), and Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash (translations). Her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Prose, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Nonfiction, and the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in Agni, DoubleTake, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is Writer-in-Residence at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland, and teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA Program in Tacoma, Washington.

    When all else fails, Buddhism becomes their last resort: providing them with physical shelter and spiritual refuge. It heals their childhood traumas and gives them a moral framework for living and a better outlook on life. Each individual story, heartrending as it may be, subtly shows what Phra Peter sees and hopes to show to others: the 'human face' of Thai Buddhism.

    Wright argues for poetry as a way of being and seeing, and calls it "the one arena where I am not inclined to crank up the fog machine." Wright's passion for the genre is pure inspiration, and in her hands the answer to the question of poetry is poetry.From "In a Word":I love the nouns of a time in a place, where a sack once was a poke and native skag was junk glass not junk and junk was just junk not smack and smack entailed eating with your mouth open, and an Egyptian one-eye was an egg, sunny side up, and a nation sack was a flannel amulet, worn only by women, to be touched only by women, especially around Memphis. Red sacks for love and green for money…C.D. Wright's most recent volume, One With Others, was a National Book Award finalist. Among her many honors are the Griffin Poetry Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship. She teaches at Brown University and lives outside of Providence, Rhode Island.

     (Note: both books (1) How to Write Descriptions of Eyes and Faces and (2) How to Write Descriptions of Hair and Skin are now available in a single, unabridged volume for readers interested in both buying both books together at a cheaper price than buying them individually: How to Write Descriptions of Eyes, Faces, Hair, Skin. ASIN: B00670OUGW.) Here, you get more help than you could possibly imagine on describing eyes and faces. Each section centers on a type of description, such as Eye Color (for example, "Crystal blue eyes"), or Appearance of the Eye (for example, "Beady eyes," or "Bedroom eyes"), or Actions Involving the Eyes (for example, "Darting eyes" or "Gawking"). Each section lists its descriptive terms alphabetically with full explanations. You can read the lists to learn new terms, or you can look up a specific term. The eye section starts with the location of colors in the iris. Through examples, you learn how physical description starts with an accurate, detailed picture of everything you see, which you condense for your fiction. You learn about the appearance of the eyes, actions involving the eyes, and how to describe eyelids, eyebrows, and eyelashes. All of this leads into more than 2,000 words explaining 82 different color names to assign to eyes that are black, blue, brown, gray, green, hazel, or violet. The face section shows how to describe facial shapes, forehead, ears, cheekbones, nose, lips, chin, and facial hair, if any. You learn about facial expressions, such as simpering or sneering, and things like the differences between a frown and a scowl. You also get a section on how the face shows different emotions. For example, you can look up "Anger" and read about common physical signs of anger such as blood rising beneath the skin, the forehead tightening, the eyes narrowing, and the nose wrinkling in disgust. Who may benefit from this book? Anyone who wants a quick prompt or idea so as not to lose his writing momentum. Readers for whom English is a second language may enjoy the in-depth explanations of American English terms. Authors in genres that demand much physical description (for example, fantasy fiction and romance fiction) may also find this book useful. How to Write Descriptions of Eyes and Faces is about 15,000 words in total. Thank you for reading.

    

    The promise of escape draws people from all backgrounds to speculative fiction, but when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, the doors are often barred. This problem lies not only with children’s publishing, but also with the television and film executives tasked with adapting these stories into a visual world. When characters of color do appear, they are often marginalized or subjected to violence, reinforcing for audiences that not all lives matter. The Dark Fantastic is an engaging and provocative exploration of race in popular youth and young adult speculative fiction. Grounded in her experiences as YA novelist, fanfiction writer, and scholar of education, Thomas considers four black girl protagonists from some of the most popular stories of the early 21st century: Bonnie Bennett from the CW’s The Vampire Diaries, Rue from Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Gwen from the BBC’s Merlin, and Angelina Johnson from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Analyzing their narratives and audience reactions to them reveals how these characters mirror the violence against black and brown people in our own world. In response, Thomas uncovers and builds upon a tradition of fantasy and radical imagination in Black feminism and Afrofuturism to reveal new possibilities. Through fanfiction and other modes of counter-storytelling, young people of color have reinvisioned fantastic worlds that reflect their own experiences, their own lives. As Thomas powerfully asserts, “we dark girls deserve more, because we are more.”

    For many people, their daily lives are a dark place with an even darker future, and John Edward shares how his belief in the power of prayer alone can help to illuminate a path for each individual to follow… using God’s gift of free will to chart our own course. Although he is quick to suggest this is not the fix to ‘find happiness’ in a material sense, the promise of living a more abundant life in general can be achieved. This book is divided into three sections. Section I deals with John’s overview of the process of prayer, his thoughts about writing on this subject matter, and the history of the rosary as authorized by the Catholic Church.   Section II is how he has utilized the power of prayer through the use of the rosary, and Section III is an audio CD that goes over the process of using the techniques of practical praying.  Includes a FREE BONUS Meditation CD!