What's the secret behind the successful and prolific careers of critically acclaimed novelists and short story writers Amy Bloom, Steve Almond, Jayne Anne Phillips, Alison Lurie, and others? Divine assistance? Otherworldly talent? An unsettlingly close relationship with the Muse? While the rest of us are staring at blank sheets of paper, struggling to come up with a first sentence, these writers are busy polishing off story after story and novel after novel. Despite producing work that may seem effortless, all of them have a simple technique for fending off writer's block: the writing exercise. In Now Write!, Sherry Ellis collects the personal writing exercises of today's best writers and lays bare the secret to their success. - In "The Photograph," Jill McCorkle divulges one of her tactics for handling material that takes plots in a million different directions; - National Book Award-nominee Amy Bloom offers "Water Buddies," an exercise for writers practicing their craft in workshops; - Steve Almond, author of My Life in Heavy Metal and Candyfreak, provides a way to avoiding purple prose in "The Five-Second Shortcut to Writing in the Lyric Register"; - and eighty-three more of the country's top writers disclose their strategies for creating memorable prose. Complemented by brief commentary from the authors themselves, the exercises in Now Write! are practical and hands-on. By encouraging writers to shamelessly steal proven techniques that have yielded books which have won National Book Awards, Pulitzers, and Guggenheim grants, Now Write! inspires the aspiring writer to write now.

    Da Jesus Book, a translation of the New Testament into pidgin. The soft-cover book was published by Wycliffe Bible Translators, the world's largest organization involved in translating the Scriptures into languages of tribal people. Retired Cornell University linguistics professor Joseph Grimes enlisted 26 pidgin speakers in the 12-year translation effort, which had its first fruit in the 1997 publication of the Gospel of Matthew.tthew. The seed for the book was planted in 1986 while Grimes was here on a teaching sabbatical at the University of Hawaii. He and his wife, Barbara, also a linguist and editor of the "Ethnologue," an index of the world's 6,800-plus languages, had participated as consultants on Wycliffe projects in Asia, Africa and South America and had completed a Bible in the Huichol Indian language in Mexico. He retired after 23 years at Cornell, and they moved to Makaha 11 years ago to dedicate time to the pidgin product. The consultants translated, consulted with Grimes, reviewed and revised each others' work in hundreds of "talk story" sessions over the years." - Excerpted from "Read the Bible, li' dat" by Mary Adamski of "The Honolulu Star-Bulletin."

    Clearly arranged and easy to use, it offers an astonishing wide range of suggestions for rhyming words, from the common and everyday to the more difficult and obscure.

    From advertisements to e-mail, from materialism to remote controls, there's a witty answer for every situation. “You have been waiting patiently for a dictionary like this to come along. And now it is here,” recognizes Napoli. “Not that you give a crap.”