This collection has more than twenty-five selections, including such important statements as "Modern Fiction" and "The Modern Essay."

    These essays illustrates Maxwell’s poetic philosophy, that the greatest verse arises from a harmony of mind and body, and that poetic forms originate in human necessities – breath, heartbeat, footstep, posture. He speaks of his inspirations, his models, and takes us inside the strange world of the Creative Writing Class, where four young hopefuls grapple with love, sex, cheap wine and hard work. With examples from canonical poets, this is a beautiful, accessible guide to the most ancient and sublime of the realms of literature.

    This incredible guide gives readers an up close look at the bricks, constructions, and minifigures of the LEGO(r) Harry Potter TM universe - from Hogwarts Castle to Hagrid's hut. You won't want to miss out on the exclusive interviews with the LEGO(r) Harry Potter TM team, and special sections allowing you to see, firsthand, how the bricks and figures come to be the toys we love today! The book will feature a timeline that shows the evolution of the LEGO(r) Harry Potter TM construction sets, video games, and board game.LEGO, the LEGO logo, the Brick configuration and the Minifigure are trademarks of the LEGO Group. (c) 2011 The LEGO Group. Produced by DK Publishing under license from the LEGO Group.TM & (c) Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. Harry Potter Publishing Rights (c) JKR. (s11)

    They describe the comics and childhood classics that first inspired them to read, and what today continues to do so. Contributors include Catherine Cookson, Jeanette Winterson, John Mortimer and Sue Townsend.

    From Machiavelli's The Prince to Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, from Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto to Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, these "influential" books have led to war, genocide, totalitarian oppression, the breakdown of the family, and disastrous social experiments. And yet the toxic ideas peddled in these books are more popular and pervasive than ever. In fact, they might influence your own thinking without your realizing it. Fortunately, Professor Benjamin Wiker is ready with an antidote, exposing the beguiling errors in each of these evil books. Witty, learned, and provocative, 10 Books That Screwed Up the World provides a quick education in the worst ideas in human history and explains how we can avoid them in the future.

    Along the way, he takes us on an exploration of lost islands, mythical realms, and the medieval world. Eco also sheds light on the indignant reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses by fascist journalists of the 1920s and 1930s, and provides a lively examination of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s notions about the soul of an unborn child, censorship, violence, and WikiLeaks. These are essays full of passion, curiosity, and obsessions by one of the world’s most esteemed scholars and critically acclaimed, best-selling novelists.

    As a bold and gifted child, his promise seemed boundless to the three adoring sisters over whom his rule was complete. But as an adult, the precocious flame of genius distorted and burned low. With neither the strength nor the resources to counter rejection, unable to sell his paintings or publish his books, Branwell became a spectre in the Bronte story, in pathetic contrast with the astonishing achievements of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. This is the biography of the shadowy figure of the "unknown" Bronte.

    The art of fiction is considered under a wide range of headings, such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Time-shift, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and each topic is illustrated by a passage or two taken from classic or modern fiction. Drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James and Martin Amis, Jane Austen and Fay Weldon and Henry Fielding and James Joyce, David Lodge makes accesible to the general reader the richness and variety of British and American fiction. Technical terms, such as Interior Monologue, Metafiction, Intertextuality and the Unreliable Narrator, are lucidly explained and their applications demonstrated.Bringing to criticism the verve and humour of his own novels, David Lodge has provided essential reading for students of literature, aspiring writers, and anyone who wishes to understand how literature works.Beginning (Jane Austen, Ford Madox Ford) --The intrusive author (George Eliot, E.M. Forster) --Suspense (Thomas Hardy) --Teenage Skaz (J.D. Salinger) --The epistolary novel (Michael Frayn) --Point of view (Henry James) --Mystery (Rudyard Kipling) --Names (David Lodge, Paul Auster) --The stream of consciousness (Virginia Woolf) --Interior monologue (James Joyce) --Defamiliarization (Charlotte Bronte) --The sense of place (Martin Amis) --Lists (F. Scott Fitzgerald) --Introducing a character (Christopher Isherwood) --Surprise (William Makepeace Thackeray) --Time-shift (Muriel Spark) --The reader in the text (Laurence Sterne) --Weather (Jane Austen, Charles Dickens) --Repetition (Ernest Hemingway) --Fancy prose (Vladimir Nabokov) --Intertextuality (Joseph Conrad) --The experimental novel (Henry Green) --The comic novel (Kingsley Amis) --Magic realism (Milan Kundera) --Staying on the surface (Malcolm Bradbury) --Showing and telling (Henry Fielding) --Telling in different voices (Fay Weldon) --A sense of the past (John Fowles). Imagining the future (George Orwell) --Symbolism (D.H. Lawrence) --Allegory (Samuel Butler) --Epiphany (John Updike) --Coincidence (Henry James) --The unreliable narrator (Kazuo Ishiguro) --The exotic (Graham Greene) --Chapters etc. (Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Sil Walter Scott, George Eliot, James Joyce) --The telephone (Evelyn Waugh) --Surrealism (Leonora Carringotn) --Irony (Arnold Bennett) --Motivation (George Eliot) --Duration (Donald Barthelme) --Implication (William Cooper) --The title (George Gissing) --Ideas (Anthony Burgess) --The non-fiction novel (Thomas Carlyle) --Metafiction (John Barth) --The uncanny (Edgar Allen Poe) --Narrative structure (Leonard Michaels) --Aporia (Samuel Beckett) --Ending (Jane Austen, William Golding)

    It's a much-needed reminder that, like J. R. R. Tolkien's hobbits, we Christians are all on an epic quest. In examining the Christian themes in the trilogy, authors Kurt Bruner and Jim Ware find that truth and fiction are not as far apart as they seem. And that although Tolkien never intended for these books to present the gospel, when read in the light of Scripture they offer a rich tapestry of redemption, values, and faith against all odds from which we may learn much.

    BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING gathers together a satisfyingly varied medley of perspectives, all exploring what it means to travel somewhere new. For the past two decades, readers have come to recognize this annual volume as the gold standard for excellence in travel writing.Overlooking Guantanamo / Benz, Stephen --The Great Divide / Crowell, Maddy --Uncomfortable Silences: a walk in Myanmar / Fettling, David --Finished / Gregory, Alice --How the Chile Pepper took over the world / Gross, Matt --I walked from Selma to Montgomery / Haile, Rahawa --Morsi the Cat / Hessler, Peter --A visit to Chernobyl:Travel in the Postapocalypse / Hewitt, Cameron --Paper Tiger / Jarvis, Brooke --Keepers of the Jungle / Knafo, Saki --Mother Tongue / Loredo, Lucas --Is this the most crowded island in the world? (and why that question matters) / MacGregor, Alex --Taming the Lionfish / MacGregor, Jeff --If these walls could talk / Markham, Lauren --The floating world / Mauk, Ben --Irmageddon / O'Neil, Devon --Water and the wall / Paumgarten, Nick --How Nashville became one big bachelorette party / Petersen, Anne Helen --These Brazilians traveled 18 hours on a riverboat to vote. I went with them / Sims, Shannon --Cursed fields / Sneider, Noah --The end of the line / Vollmann, William T. --"The Greatest" / Wilson, Jason --Tributary / Yen, Jessica --Tourist Trap / Zha, Jianying

    Crafting Short Screenplays That Connect is the first screenwriting guide to introduce connection as an essential, although essentially overlooked, aspect of creating stories for the screen and of the screenwriting process itself. Written with clarity and humor, this book teaches the craft of writing short screenplays by guiding the student through carefully focused writing exercises of increasing length and complexity. Eight award-winning student screenplays are included for illustration and inspiration.The text is divided into three parts. Part one focuses on preparing to write by means of exercises designed to help students think more deeply about the screenwriter's purposes; their own unique vision, material and process; and finally about what screenplays are at their simplest and most profound level—a pattern of human change, created from specific moments of change—discoveries and decisions. Part two teaches students how to craft an effective pattern of human change. It guides them through the writing and re-writing of "Five (Not So Easy) Pieces"—five short screenplays of increasing length and complexity—focusing on a specific principle of dramatic technique: The Discovery, The Decision, The Boxing Match, The Improbable Connection, and The Long Short Screenplay. Part Three presents the five screenplays used throughout the book to illustrate the dramatic principles that have beendiscussed, and includes interviews with the screenwriters, a look at where they are now and what they are doing, and brief discussion of how each film evolved. * Groundbreaking book that stresses human connection as the basis of a good screenplay&151;not conflict* The only screenwriting book that includes a DVD that contains performances of the short films and screenplays that are featured in the book* Ample exercises for practice and inspiration

    Both evoke a similar sensation in us — we find them beautiful and magical, but also spooky, sometimes horrifying.In this fascinating book, Maitland argues that the two forms are intimately connected: the mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils of the forests were both the background and the source of fairytales. Yet both forests and fairy stories are at risk and their loss deprives us of our cultural lifeblood. Maitland visits forests through the seasons, from the exquisite green of a beechwood in spring, to the muffled stillness of a snowy pine wood in winter. She camps with her son Adam, whose beautiful photographs are included in the book; she takes a barefoot walk through Epping Forest with Robert Macfarlane; she walks with a mushroom expert through an oak wood, and with a miner through the Forest of Dean. Maitland ends each chapter with a unique, imaginitive re-telling of a fairystory.Written with Sara's wonderful clarity and conversational grace, Gossip from the Forest is a magical and unique blend of nature writing, history and imaginative fiction.

    Inspired by the marvelous meals in the Cat Who novels, these 200+ recipes will make fans feel like they're visiting the best restaurants and attending the most delightful dinner parties in Moose County.

    She invites us behind the scenes of novel-writing, sharing her own habits and spilling the secrets of her craft. And she offers priceless advice to aspiring authors. As she works her way through one hundred novels–from classics such as the thousand-year-old Tale of Genji to recent fiction by Zadie Smith and Alice Munro–she infects us anew with the passion for reading that is the governing spirit of this gift to book lovers everywhere.

    Recognized internationally as one of America's greatest literary critics, Helen Vendler is a frequent reviewer of poetry for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Poems, Poets, Poetry reflects her teaching to thousands of undergraduates in the core poetry course that she has taught at Harvard since 1981.- An innovative approach to reading and writing about poetry. Part One begins with a unique demonstration: Vendler first reads a dozen poems to show how they represent life events, then rereads the same dozen poems to reveal how poets use language to transform those events into memorable art. The author devotes the rest of the text to unfolding poetry's layers: formal, thematic, linguistic, lyric, social, historical, and evaluative. To illustrate this, Vendler examines 65 poems, and provides prompts to help students read 106 others. Two new chapters in Part Two illuminate ways to think and write about both individual works and groups of poems.- An ample and diverse anthology of 268 poems by 128 poets. Spanning eight centuries of English-language poetry, the anthology in Part Three offers a broad choice of canonical and contemporary selections that includes one of the most extensive collections of multicultural American poetry available in an introductory text.