Leading her quest is a desire to understand the source of the writer’s inspiration—do subjects haunt those that might bring them back to life until the writer submits? Or does something “happen” to us, a sudden ignition of a burning flame? Can the appearance of a muse-like Other bring about a writer’s best work?In Soul at the White Heat, Oates deploys her keenest critical faculties, conjuring contemporary and past voices whose work she deftly and creatively dissects for clues to these elusive questions. Virginia Woolf, John Updike, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith and many others appear as predecessors and peers—material through which Oates sifts in acting as literary detective, philosopher, and student. The book is at its most thrilling when watching the writer herself at work, and Oates provides rare insight into her own process, in candid, self-aware dispatches from the author’s own writing room. The New York Times Book Review has raved, “who better than Joyce Carol Oates . . . to explicate the craft of writing?” Longtime admirers of Joyce Carol Oates’s novels as well as her prose will discover much to be inspired by and obsess upon themselves in this inventive collection from an American master.

    From canoe camping next to unnamed lakes, to kayaking in Alaska’s pristine waters, she describes her many encounters with the bears, moose and other animals that make this wilderness their home. With her partner David she helped to build a cabin on a remote piece of property, off the grid and accessible only by boat. Illustrated with the photos she took along the way, her story is sometimes comic, and sometimes tragic, but throughout its pages she speaks with the voice of one who loves nature and the wilderness.

    Chunk follows him along his crazy, overweight journey; from the chubby 10-year old who stole brownies and tricked his parents into thinking he’d lost weight, to the teenage boy who made regular after-school plans to eat entire pies, to the adult man who still hates working out and still loves Cinnabons. It’s a bracingly funny and delightfully uncomfortable collection of essays exploring food, fitness, and the funny things that happen when we try to slim down and grow up. Brian Donovan has written for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, National Public Radio, and, most recently, ABC’s The Neighbors. His work has also appeared on Chapelle’s Show, Funny or Die, and Off Broadway in New York City. His “Not a Match: My True Tales of Online Dating Disasters” is currently being developed for television. Cover design by Adil Dara.

    It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore."In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.

    This anthology covers all of the major topics that fall within this subject and includes essays and excerpts from fifty authors, including C.S. Lewis, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothy Sayers, and Frederick Buechner.

    The book follows the author's death-defying 200-mile journey in his antique Thomas Crapper bath - not just across the Channel, but around Kent - right up to the tremendous reception and huge media attention which awaited him under Tower Bridge. Tim met the Queen, and his bath now resides in the National Maritime Museum of Great Britain.

    She was determined to find a better life for herself, away from the oppression and isolation of her Satmar upbringing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And in Exodus, Revisited she delves into what happened next--taking the reader on a journey that starts with her beginning life anew as a single mother, a religious refugee, and an independent woman in search of a place and a community where she can belong. Originally published in 2014, Deborah has now revisited and significantly expanded her story, and the result is greater insight into her quest to discover herself and the true meaning of home. Travels that start with making her way in New York expand into an exploration of America and eventually lead to trips across Europe to retrace her grandmother's life during the Holocaust, before she finds a landing place in the unlikeliest of cities. Exodus, Revisited is a deeply moving examination of the nature of memory and generational trauma, and of reconciliation with both yourself and the world.

    Exercises and activities encourage writers to develop their skills, and contributions from forty authors provide a generous pool of information, experience, and advice. This book should be of interest to those who are just starting to write, as well as those who want some help honing work already completed. It should suit people writing for publication or just for their own pleasure, those writing on their own or in writing groups.

    No reporter, who flew in, contacted a few dissidents, and flew out again, could ever match his experience, insight, or personal adventures. His book, For The Love Of Prague, is part love story, part history, part a record of national lunacy, and part terror. It is all true, with real names, real people, and real incidents. The New York Times, in a two-thirds page illustrated story, hailed it as a spicy, funny memoir! About the Author: Gene Deitch is an Oscar-winning animation film director and scenarist. He is a voting member of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Scientists. In the early 1950s he was Creative Director of UPA s New York studio, where among his many gold-medal winning films were the famous Bert & Harry Piels beer commercials. His TV commercials were the first ever shown at the New York Museum of Modern Art. In 1956 CBS purchased the Terrytoons animation studio and named Gene Deitch as its Creative Director. Under his supervision and direction, the studio produced 18 CinemaScope cartoons per year for 20th Century-Fox, and won its very first Oscar nomination. He personally created and directed the Tom Terrific series for the CBS nationwide Captain Kangaroo show. Tom Terrific, with Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog, was the very first animated serial for network television. In 1958 he set up his own studio, Gene Deitch Associates, inc., in New York.

    Rather than appealing to altruism, or calling for revolution in the global economy, the Epicurean philosophy turns the developed world's credo of 'greed is good' on its head, counselling that genuine happiness comes from the quieting of desire; from less, not more. And that might just be the mindset we need to rein in unsustainable development.In this thoughtful Penguin Special, Slattery traces the radicalism of classical Epicurean thought, and its popularity despite political suppression. Along the way, he tours the archaeological sites of the ancient village of Oinoanda in Turkey and the Villa of the Papyri, buried along with Pompeii, with its ancient library of petrified scrolls. Might some of this treasure's fragments, painstakingly restored, reveal answers to the big questions faced in the twenty-first century?

    From a child to the National President of one the most notorious Motorcycle clubs in history. The best book of its genre.Once you start it you won't be able to put it down.

    Twenty of America’s bestselling memoirists share their innermost thoughts and hard-earned tips with veteran author Meredith Maran, revealing what drives them to tell their personal stories, and the nuts and bolts of how they do it. Speaking frankly about issues ranging from turning oneself into an authentic, compelling character to exposing hard truths, these successful authors disclose what keeps them going, what gets in their way, and what they love most—and least—about writing about themselves.

    i & my parents2. i & their son3. i & selfdiscovery4. i & you & is5. i & now & him6. i & am & santa clausThese talks contain selections from the poetry of Wordsworth, Donne, Shakespeare, Dante, and others, including e.e. cummings. Together, it forms a good introduction to the work of e.e. cummings.

    Taking her own experience of translating Roland Barthes’s lecture notes as a starting point, the author threads various stories together to give us this portrait of translation as a compelling, complex and intensely relational activity. She recounts the story of Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations of Thomas Mann, and their posthumous vilification. She writes about the loving relationship between André Gide and his translator Dorothy Bussy. She recalls how Robinson Crusoe laboriously made a table, for him for the first time, on an undeserted island. With This Little Art, a beautifully layered account of a subjective translating experience, Kate Briggs emerges as a truly remarkable writer: distinctive, wise, frank, funny and utterly original.

    But, undeterred, he commences a deeply felt meditation on poetry, its language and meaning, and its power to open minds and transform lives. By the end of the book, Parini has recovered a truth often obscured by our clamorous culture: without poetry, we live only partially, not fully conscious of the possibilities that life affords. Poetry indeed matters. A gifted poet and acclaimed teacher, Parini begins by looking at defenses of poetry written over the centuries. He ponders Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus, and moves on through Sidney, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Eliot, Frost, Stevens, and others. Parini examines the importance of poetic voice and the mysteries of metaphor. He argues that a poet’s originality depends on a deep understanding of the traditions of political poetry, nature poetry, and religious poetry. Writing with a casual grace, Parini avoids jargon and makes his case in concise, direct terms: the mind of the poet supplies a light to the minds of others, kindling their imaginations, helping them to live their lives. The author’s love of poetry suffuses this insightful book—a volume for all readers interested in a fresh introduction to the art that lies at the center of Western civilization.