"In the tradition of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Milan Kundera's The Art of the Novel, How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction--an analysis of its main elements and a celebration of its lasting power. Here one of the most prominent and stylish critics of our time looks into the machinery of storytelling to ask some fundamental questions: What do we mean when we say we "know" a fictional character? What constitutes...

"Where do authors get their ideas? And how do they turn those ideas into stories? This anthology looks at the process of taking real-life experiences and turning them into works of engaging fiction. The collection features award-winning and bestselling middle-grade authors who provide both original fictional short stories as well as the nonfiction accounts that inspired them. The contributing authors include Julia Alvarez, Karen Cushman, Margarita...

From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues...

Priscilla Cilla Lee-Jenkins has just finished her (future) bestselling memoir, and now she's ready to write a Classic. This one promises to have everything: romance, adventure, and plenty of drama like Cilla's struggles to be more Chinese, to be the perfect flower girl at Aunt Eva's wedding, and to learn how to share her best friend.

After twelve-year-old Natalie writes a wonderful novel, her friend Zoe helps her devise a scheme to get it accepted at the publishing house where Natalie's mother works as an editor.

"In Everything and Less, acclaimed critic Mark McGurl discovers a dynamic scene of literary experimentation in an unlikely location: in the realms of self-publishing created by Amazon. Reclaiming several works of self-published fiction from the abyss of critical disregard, McGurl offers a Copernican revolution in the world of letters: rather than giving central importance to the critically lionized highbrows-Colson Whitehead, Don DeLillo, Elena Ferrante,...

When over eighty prominent children's authors learn they are suspects in the murder of despicable book editor Herman Mildew, they provide less-than-credible alibis.

Writing well is for school. Writing effectively is for life. Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink offer the most valuable practical writing advice today. Building on their own research in behavioral science, they outline cognitive facts about how people actually read and distill them into six principles that will transform the power of your writing: Less is more Make reading easy Design for easy navigation Use enough formatting, but no more Tell readers...

In the seven years since the previous edition debuted, we have seen an extraordinary evolution in the way we create and share knowledge. This seventeenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style has been prepared with an eye toward how we find, create, and cite information that readers are as likely to access from their pockets as from a bookshelf. It offers updated guidelines on electronic workflows and publication formats, tools for PDF annotation...