Selected Letters: 1958-1965


Charles Bukowski - 2004
    These letters to various friends, lovers and literary contacts provide an intimate and fascinating look at Bukowski's mind, his emotions, his attitude towards his own creativity and the comings and goings of his daily life.

Word Painting Revised Edition: The Fine Art of Writing Descriptively


Rebecca McClanahan - 2014
    The words you choose to describe your characters, scenes, settings, and ideas--in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction--need to precisely illustrate the vision you want to convey. Word Painting Revised Edition shows you how to color your canvas with descriptions that captivate readers. Inside, you'll learn how to:Develop your powers of observation to uncover rich, evocative descriptions.Discover and craft original and imaginative metaphors and similes.Effectively and accurately describe characters and settings.Weave description seamlessly through your stories, essays, and poems.You'll also find dozens of descriptive passages from master authors and poets--as well as more than one hundred exercises--to illuminate the process. Whether you are writing a novel or a poem, a memoir or an essay, Word Painting Revised Edition will guide you in the creation of your own literary masterpiece.

A Gringo Like Me: Poems


Jennifer L. Knox - 2005
    Knox’s A Gringo Like Me contains poems at once raucous and sexy, tender and raw. Knox has collected dramatic monologues, personal lyrics, and even screenplays together in a single energetic volume for a genuinely surprising debut. In favorites such as “Hot Ass Poem,” “Cruising for Prostitutes,” and “Chicken Bucket,” Knox’s quirky characters appear ornery, hickish, misogynist, or worse, but each elucidates a truth worth knowing, even if it’s not always welcome. In poems like "A Common American Name" and "Freckles," Knox’s lyrical voice charms readers. Between the poles of her unique range, Knox straddles and tames what she may yet prove to be an artificial divide in American poetry: she's a former slam champion, but also a two-time contributor to The Best American Poetry; she's a hilarious performer on stage, but also a deeply intellectual and formally disciplined poet.

Selected Poems


James Schuyler - 1988
    One of the most significant writers of the New York School—which unofficially included John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch, among others—Schuyler was strongly influenced by both art and music in his work, often incorporating rapid shifts in sound, shape, and color within his poems that almost gave his work the effect of a collage and engendered comparisons with Whitman and Rimbaud.

To The Women: words to live by


Donna Ashworth - 2020
    

The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets


David Lehman - 1998
    Every night, at a rundown tavern with a magnificent bar called the Cedar Tavern, an extraordinary group or painters, writers, poets, and hangers-on arrive to drink, argue, tell jokes, fight, start affairs, and bang out a powerful new aesthetic. Their style is playful, irreverent, tradition-shattering, and brilliant. Out of these friendships, and these conversations, will come the works of art and poetry that will define New York City as the capital of world culture--abstract expressionism and the New York School of Poetry.A richly detailed portrait of one of the great movements in American arts and letters, The Last Avant-Garde covers the years 1948-1966 and focuses on four fast friends--the poets Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. Lehman brings to vivid life the extraordinary creative ferment of the time and place, the relationship of great friendship to art, and the powerful influence that a group of visual artisits--especially Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Fairfield Porter--had on the literary efforts of the New York School.The Last Avant-Garde is both a definitive and lively view of a quintessentially American aesthetic and an exploration of the dynamics of creativity.

Green-Light Your Book: How Writers Can Succeed in the New Era of Publishing


Brooke Warner - 2016
    Written for aspiring authors, previously published authors, and independent publishers, it explains the ever-shifting publishing landscape and helps indie authors understand that they're up against the status quo, and how to work within the system but also how to subvert the system in order to succeed. Publishing expert and independent publisher Brooke Warner is fearless in her critique of an industry that's lost its mandate, and in so doing has opened the door wide for indie publishers to thrive. While she does not shy away from calling out the bias against indie authors, she also asserts that it's never been a more exciting time to be in book publishing--and her passion and enthusiasm are contagious. "If you're going to green-light your work, you have to wow," Warner writes. But to surpass expectations, you also need to be a student of publishing and to be able to hold your own with book buyers, event coordinators, librarians, wholesalers, distributors, and reviewers. Green-Light Your Book seeks to equip authors and publishers with the language, knowledge, and skill sets they need to play big.

May I Have Your Attention, Please? Your Guide to Business Writing That Charms, Captivates and Converts


Mish Slade - 2016
    It's near impossible for customers to cut through the "innovative solutions" and "passion for customer service," and find out who can actually give them what they need.For the business owner who's willing to do something different, though, it represents a major - and inexpensive - competitive advantage.May I Have Your Attention, Please? lays out 12 simple principles that allow business owners - even those with no writing experience - to attract and enchant their dream customers. With clear and concise explanations of what works and why, and examples of the best and worst text out there, you'll have all the tools you need to turn readers into buyers into raving fans. Give your writing skills an instant upgradeIn this short book, you'll learn: Simple techniques to turn your dull-as-dishwater business marketing into "can't resist" copy - even if you don't think of yourself as a "good writer." How to make price irrelevant and be the only choice for your ideal customer - by changing nothing except your copywriting. The business writing "rules" you should revel in breaking. Why copying your competitors is a dangerous waste of time... and what to do instead (without spending hours searching for ideas). The easily avoidable mistakes that are turning your customers off - even if they don't know it. A simple framework to help you blast through writer's block and know exactly what to say in any piece of writing. How to "read your customers' minds," and get them looking for reasons to buy from you. Who is this book for? Business owners looking to breathe more life into their website, content marketing or sales materials. Employees who want to gain a new skill and have more impact in their work. Anyone who has something great to offer - but is struggling to get the message across.

If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit


Brenda Ueland - 1938
    She said she had two rules she followed absolutely: to tell the truth, and not to do anything she didn't want to do. Her integrity shines throughout If You Want to Write, her best-selling classic on the process of writing that has already inspired thousands to find their own creative center. Carl Sandburg called this book "The best book ever written about how to write." Yet Ueland reminds us that "Whenever I say 'writing' in this book, I also mean anything that you love and want to do or to make." Ueland's writing and her teaching are made compelling by her feisty spirit of independence and joy.

Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted


Andrew Wilson - 2013
    This encounter—now one of the most famous in all of literary history—was recorded by Plath in her journal, where she described Hughes as a “big, dark, hunky boy.” Sylvia viewed Ted as something of a colossus, and to this day his enormous shadow has obscured her life and work. The sensational aspects of the Plath-Hughes relationship have dominated the cultural landscape to such an extent that their story has taken on the resonance of a modern myth.Before she met Ted, Plath had lived a complex, creative, and disturbing life. Her father had died when she was only eight; she had gone out with literally hundreds of men, had been unofficially engaged, had tried to commit suicide, and had written more than two hundred poems. Mad Girl’s Love Song chronicles these early years, traces the sources of her mental instability, and examines how a range of personal, economic, and societal factors—the real disquieting muses— conspired against her.Drawing on exclusive interviews with friends and lovers who have never spoken openly about Plath before and using previously unavailable archives and papers, this is the first book to focus on the early life of the twentieth century’s most popular and enduring female poet. Mad Girl’s Love Song reclaims Sylvia Plath from the tangle of emotions associated with her relationship with Ted Hughes and reveals the origins of her unsettled and unsettling voice.

Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure


Larry Smith - 2008
    When the online storytelling magazine SMITH asked readers to submit six-word memoirs, they proved a whole, real life can be told this way, too. The results are fascinating, hilarious, shocking, and moving. From small sagas of bittersweet romance ("Found true love, married someone else") to proud achievements and stinging regrets ("After Harvard, had baby with crackhead"), these terse true tales relate the diversity of human experience in tasty bite-size pieces. The original edition of Not Quite What I Was Planning spent six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and thanks to massive media attention—from NPR to the The New Yorker—the six-word memoir concept spread to classrooms, dinner tables, churches, synagogues, and tens of thousands of blogs. This deluxe edition has been revised and expanded to include more than sixty never-before-seen memoirs. From authors Elizabeth Gilbert, Richard Ford, and Joyce Carol Oates to celebrities Stephen Colbert, Mario Batali, and Joan Rivers to ordinary folks around the world, everyone has a six-word story to tell.

Connecting with Students Online: Strategies for Remote Teaching & Learning


Jennifer Serravallo - 2020
    Now that you're making the shift to online teaching, it's time to answer your biggest questions about remote, digitally based instruction:How do I build and nurture relationships with students and their at-home adults from afar? How do I adapt my best teaching to an online setting? How do I keep a focus on students and their needs when they aren't in front of me? Jennifer Serravallo's Connecting with Students Online gives you concise, doable answers based on her own experiences and those of the teachers, administrators, and coaches she has communicated with during the pandemic. Focusing on the vital importance of the teacher-student connection, Jen guides you to:effectively prioritize what matters most during remote, online instruction schedule your day and your students' to maximize teaching and learning (and avoid burnout) streamline curricular units and roll them out digitally record highly engaging short lessons that students will enjoy and learn from confer, working with small groups, and drive learning through independent practice partner with the adults in a student's home to support your work with their child. Featuring simplified, commonsense suggestions, 55 step-by-step teaching strategies, and video examples of Jen conferring and working with small groups, Connecting with Students Online helps new teachers, teachers new to technology, or anyone who wants to better understand the essence of effective online instruction. Along the way Jen addresses crucial topics including assessment and progress monitoring, student engagement and accountability, using anchor charts and visuals, getting books into students' hands, teaching subject-area content, and avoiding teacher burnout.During this pandemic crisis turn to one of education's most trusted teaching voices to help you restart or maintain students' progress. Jennifer Serravallo's Connecting with Students Online is of-the-moment, grounded in important research, informed by experience, and designed to get you teaching well-and confidently-as quickly as possible. Jen will be donating a portion of the proceeds from Connecting with Students Online to organizations that help children directly impacted by COVID-19.

Suppose a Sentence


Brian Dillon - 2020
    It is both an experiment in the attentive form of the essay - asking what happens, and where one might wander, when as readers and writers we pay minute attention to the language before us - and a polemic for certain kinds of experiment in prose. In a series of essays, each taking a single sentence as its starting point, the book explores style, voice and context. But it also uses its subjects - from George Eliot to Joan Didion, John Donne to Annie Dillard - to ask what the sentence is today and what it might become next.

Evolve: 2 Minute Wisdom


Radhanath Swami - 2011
    Thus facilitating our desert like hearts to grow lotuses.”Evolve is based on various talks given by H.H. Radhanath Swami. This is neither an exact transcription nor an overly corrected version.

Jesus in India


Mirza Ghulam Ahmad - 1899
    Christian and Muslim scriptures provide evidence about this journey.