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. Booker analyses why evolution has given us the need to tell stories and illustrates how storytelling has provided a uniquely revealing mirror to mankind's psychological development over the past 5000 years.This seminal book opens up in an entirely new way our understanding of the real purpose storytelling plays in our lives, and will be a talking point for years to come.

    4 is an elucidation of the writer's craft by a master practitioner. In a series of playful but expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he's gathered over his career and refined during his long-running course at Princeton University, where he has launched some of the most esteemed writers of several generations. McPhee offers a definitive guide to the crucial decisions regarding structure, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces, and presents extracts from some of his best-loved work, subjecting them to wry scrutiny. The result is a vivid depiction of the writing process, from reporting to drafting to revising and revising, and revising.More than a compendium of advice, Draft No. 4 is enriched by personal detail and charming reflections on the life of a writer. McPhee describes his enduring relationships with The New Yorker and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and recalls his early years at Time magazine. Enlivened by his keen sense of writing as a way of being in the world, Draft No. 4 is the long-awaited master class given by America's most renowned writing instructor.

    This book is a young writer’s toolbox for bringing writing to life. But instead of awls and hammers, this toolbox contains words, imagination, a love of books, a sense of story, and ideas for how to make the writing live and breathe.Perfect for classrooms, Live Writing is full of practical wisdom for young writers, from bestselling writer Ralph Fletcher. Aspiring writers will devour these tips for how to make their words jump off the page!

    As a young girl, she was the victim of a horrifying act of violence that changed her life and would strongly influence her career as a writer. In her 2017 memoir Hunger, she addressed that trauma head-on, writing with bracing honesty about her body and the ways that food can be used both to bury pain and make oneself disappear. The response to Hunger by some critics who seemed to take perverse pleasure in highlighting Gay’s vulnerabilities was itself a fresh wound. By exploring trauma publicly, Gay suffered more of it.In her Scribd Original Writing into the Wound, Gay not only talks openly about trauma in her personal life—from her fraught time as an undergraduate at Yale to the stress of returning there as a visiting professor to the fallout from Hunger—but also about the collective trauma we’ve experienced this past year. COVID-19, racial and economic inequality, political strife, imminent environmental disaster, and more: Gay catalogs it all with her trademark candor and authority. To make sense of our pain, she suggests, we need to explore it fully, even as we’re still in the midst of it. Just as she writes her way through her own traumas and coaches her students to do the same, she urges us to take a long, hard look at the wounds we all share: “The world as we knew it has broken wide open. There is a before and an after, and the world will never again be what it once was. That sounds terrifying, but it is an opportunity.”“To change the world, we need to face what has become of it,” she writes. “To heal from a trauma, we need to understand the extent of it.” Full of wisdom and rage and grace, Writing into the Wound is a remarkable consideration of where we are, and where we need to go, by one of the finest authors and cultural critics of her generation.

    The entire process is explained in simple, easy to understand terms, so you can create a great blog without any technical knowledge. First, you will learn the basic process of WordPress blogging, which is the free software your blog will be built with. Once that is done, you will move on to customization of your new blog. The book then ends with chapters on promoting your blog and blogging for profit. In addition, the author offers additional support and updates through his website, free of charge.

    Now an internationally recognized scientist at a top U.S. medical school—one of the leading researchers in the field—sheds light on the extraordinary benefits of these natural health superstars. Thanks to an explosion of research in recent years, one thing is clear: probiotics, the healthy bacteria that inhabit the digestive tract, are the body’s silent partners for good health, optimizing the power of the immune system to fight disease and the “bad” germs we fear. But how do they work? And in the face of factors like stress and poor diet, which decrease their numbers, how do you keep your supply well stocked? Here is an up-to-the-minute, highly accessible guide to probiotics and the foods and supplements that contain and support them—many of which may be in your diet already. Discover:The key role of probiotics and prebiotics in restoring healthy balance to our bodies, improving immune system functioning, and curbing inflammationHow to use probiotic foods and supplements to prevent and relieve allergies, inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, yeast infections, and the negative side effects of antibiotic useNew evidence that probiotics may help fight asthma, cardiovascular disease, breast and colon cancer, autoimmune diseases, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia—and even obesityNatural sources of prebiotics, the nutrients that help make the digestive tract more hospitable for probiotic bacteriaThe Probiotics Revolution also includes a step-by-step plan for incorporating the many food sources of probiotics and prebiotics into your diet, a complete buyer’s guide to probiotic supplements, and how to introduce probiotics to your family and children.From the Hardcover edition.

    He chronicles his journey in the New York Times bestseller Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World. What brought Denby back to his alma mater was not a sense of nostalgia, but the current academic debate surrounding Western literature. This culture war centers on the left's denunciation of "dead white European males" as oppressive and exclusionary and the right's reverence of the Western canon as the foundation of traditional values and patriotism. Like many of the extremists engaged in the debate, Denby found his memories of these works faded and forgotten. "I possessed information without knowledge, opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs.... And I wanted to add my words to the debate from the ground up, beginning and ending in literature, never leaving the books themselves." Thus Denby returns to Columbia for the two "great books" courses: Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization. During his yearlong education he explores the difficulties of going back to reading seriously; analyzes today's college students; observes the teaching styles of four professors; and enters into a period of self-discovery as he learns to deal with life as a middle-aged student, father, and husband. Along the way he gains a new appreciation of writers such as Homer, Boccaccio, Austen, Nietzsche, Conrad, Machiavelli, Marx, and Woolf. He walks away from his experiences believing deeply that students today, more than ever, need this type of humanistic education and that both sides of the culture war are simplifying the Western tradition.

    Ripley. Coming from Miramax Films in December 2003, Cold Mountain stars Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Renée Zellweger, Natalie Portman, Giovanni Ribisi and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Directed by Academy Award®-winner Anthony Minghella who also wrote the screenplay, Cold Mountain is based on Charles Frazier's best-selling Civil War novel of the same name and tells the story of Inman (Law), a wounded confederate soldier who is on a perilous journey home to his mountain community, hoping to reunite with his pre-war sweetheart, Ada (Kidman). In his absence, Ada struggles to survive, and revive her father's farm with the help of intrepid young drifter Ruby (Zellweger).The Newmarket Pictorial Moviebook is annotated with illustrations, movie stills, production design sketches keyed to the screenplay, costume designs, sidebars, and commentary from the cast and crew.

    Contents: Observation and Deduction; Self-Education; On Not Being a Sily Ass; Common Sense; Resourcefulness; Endurance; On Being Accurate; Patience; Gratitude; Courtesy; Goodwill; Honour; Keeping You Nerve; Courage; Keeping Your Pecker Up; Humour; Don't Swank; On 'Sticking it Out"; How To Be Fit; The Duty of Service; Helpfulness; Responsibility; Self-Sacrifice.

    Sudden Fiction brilliantly captures the tremendous popularity of this new and distinctly American form.

    It is essential reading for designer, critic, and straight-up rank 'n' file gamer alike." --Robin D. Laws, creator of HeroQuest and Feng Shui Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball think a lot about games. At their commentary website, Gameplaywright.net, they think out loud about what it means to play games, make games, sell games, and love games. They are gamers. Here, with fellow game designers and notable game players, they think out loud on paper in the first Gameplaywright book. Things We Think About Games collects dozens on dozens of bite-sized thoughts about games. From the absurd to the magnificent, the demonstrable to the dogmatic, this collection spans both the breadth of games--board, card, roleplaying and more--and the depth of gaming, offering insights about collecting, playing, critiquing, designing, and publishing.

    Using examples from a range of stores from fashion emporia to supermarkets, the book offers practical advice on the subject, supported by hints and tips from established visual merchandisers. It reveals the secrets of their tool kit, and information on the use of mannequins, the latest technology, how to construct and source props, and explains the psychology behind shopping and buyer behavior.Presented through color photographs, diagrams of floor layouts, and store case studies, and includinginvaluable information such as a glossary of terms used in the industry, Visual Merchandising is an essential handbook for anyone working in and learning about this exciting area.

    

    Anthony Cronin’s account of life in post-war literary Dublin is as funny and colourful as one would expect from an intimate of Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and Myles na Gopaleen; but it is also a clear-eyed and bracing antidote to the kitsch that passes for literary history and memory in the Dublin of today. Cronin writes with remarkable subtlety of the frustrations and pathologies of this generation: the excess of drink, the shortage of sex, the insecurity and begrudgery, the painful limitations of cultural life, and the bittersweet pull of exile. We read of a comical sojourn in France with Behan, and of Cronin’s years in London as a literary editor and a friend of the writer Julian Maclaren-Ross and the painters Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun. The generation chronicled by Cronin was one of wasted promise. That waste is redressed through the shimmering prose of Dead as Doornails, earning its place in Irish literary history alongside the best works of Behan, Kavanagh and Myles.

    O’Bannon also includes his insights on subjects such as the logic of the three-act structure, the role of the producer in screenplay development, and the psychological principle known as “hedonic adaptation,” which has a unique effect on the structuring of screen stories.