The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors PDF Download

Author: Laura Miller
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
"An all-original, A-to-Z guide to 225 of the most fascinating writers of our time, penned by an international cast of talented young critics and reviewers."--Cover.

Author: Dave Mote
Publisher: Saint James Press
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
"Included are authors, both living and dead, who were active in the early 1960s or later and remain popular in the mid-1990s ... representing several fiction and nonfiction categories, including poets, short-story writers, biographers, and other niche authors."--Page xi

Author: Nathan Carlin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000474860
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
This book examines the phenomenon of physician-authors. Focusing on the books that contemporary doctors write--the stories that they tell--with contributors critically engaging their work. A selection of original chapters from leading scholars in medical and health humanities analyze the literary output of doctors, including Oliver Sacks, Danielle Ofri, Atul Gawande, Louise Aronson, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Abraham Verghese. Discussing issues of moral meaning in the works of contemporary doctor-writers, from memoir to poetry, this collection reflects some of the diversity of medicine today. A key reference for all students and scholars of medical and health humanities, the book will be especially useful for those interested in the relationship between literature and practising medicine.

Author: Barbara Shoup
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820332798
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
Novel Ideas provides a substantial introduction to the elements of fiction followed by in-depth interviews with successful novelists who speak with candor and insight into the complex process by which a novel is made. This edition includes new and updated interviews as well as writing exercises to enhance its use in the writing classroom. Dorothy Allison recalls "deliciously self-indulgent" days of writing in her bathrobe, wrapped in misery and exultation; Peter Cameron explains how he made the move from short fiction to the novel with the aid of a music composer's notebook to track the movement of his characters. Writers as different as Ha Jin, Jill McCorkle, Richard Ford, and Michael Chabon describe their unique approaches to their work while consistently affirming the necessity of committing to the hard effort of it while also remaining open to surprise. Aspiring novelists will find hands-on strategies for beginning, working through, and revising a novel; accomplished novelists will discover new ways to solve the problems they face in process; and serious readers of contemporary fiction will enjoy a glimpse into the way novels are made. Includes interviews with: Dorothy Allison Larry Brown Peter Cameron Michael Chabon Michael Cunningham Robb Forman Dew Richard Ford Ha Jin Patricia Henley Charles Johnson Wally Lamb Valerie Martin Jill McCorkle Sena Jeter Naslund Lewis Nordan Sheri Reynolds S. J. Rozan Jane Smiley Lee Smith Theodore Weesner

Author: Catherine Rainwater
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813182999
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Ann Beattie, Annie Dillard, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, Anne Redmon, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker all seem to be especially concerned with narrative management. The ten essays in this book raise new and intriguing questions about the ways these leading women writers appropriate and transform generic norms and ultimately revise literary tradition to make it more inclusive of female experience, vision, and expression. The contributors to this volume discover diverse narrative strategies. Beattie, Dillard, Paley, and Redmon in divergent ways rely heavily upon narrative gaps, surfaces, and silences, often suggesting depths which are lamentably absent from modern experience or which mysteriously elude language. For Kingston and Walker, verbal assertiveness is the focus of narratives depicting the gradual empowerment of female protagonists who learn to speak themselves into existence. Ozick and Tyler disrupt conventional reader expectations of the "anti-novel" and the "family novel," respectively. Finally, Morrison's and Piercy's works reveal how traditional narrative forms such as the Bildungsroman and the "soap opera" are adaptable to feminist purposes. In examining the writings of these ten important women authors, this book illuminates a significant moment in literary history when women's voices are profoundly reshaping American literary tradition.

Author: Isaac Asimov
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited
ISBN: 1789828007
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 53

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Book Description
When strange animals land in Red's yard, he and his friend Slim agree to keep it to themselves. The creatures are unlike any that they've ever seen before, and are - to them - animals that would make a fortune putting on a show at the circus. All the while, their fathers are fretting over the arrival of interstellar diplomats, on whose trade their civilisation may have to rely on to survive. Despite the urgency of the mission, however, neither hide nor hair of them have been seen...

Author: Arthur Kleinman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019533132X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
In this moving and thought-provoking volume, Arthur Kleinman tells the unsettling stories of a handful of men and women, some of whom have lived through some of the most fundamental transitions of the turbulent twentieth century. Here we meet an American veteran of World War II, tortured by the memory of the atrocities he committed while a soldier in the Pacific. A French-American woman aiding refugees in sub-Saharan Africa, facing the utter chaos of a society where life has become meaningless. A Chinese doctor trying to stay alive during Mao's cultural revolution, discovering that the only values that matter are those that get you beyond the next threat. These individuals found themselves caught in circumstances where those things that matter most to them--their desires, status, relationships, resources, political and religious commitments, life itself--have been challenged by the society around them. Each is caught up in existential moral experiences that define what it means to be human, with an intensity that makes their life narratives arresting. These stories reveal just how malleable moral life is, and just how central danger is to our worlds and our livelihood. Indeed, Kleinman offers in this book a groundbreaking approach to ethics, examining "who we are" through some of the most disturbing issues of our time--war, globalization, poverty, social injustice--all in the context of actual lived moral life.

Author: Malcolm Bradbury
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719006777
Category : American fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Britain's most important contemporary authors reflect intelligently and imaginatively on the nature and development of the modern novel.

Author: Tim Johnston
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616203048
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
A Breakout NEW YORK TIMES Bestseller A USA Today Bestseller An Indie National Bestseller “Outstanding . . . The days when you had to choose between a great story and a great piece of writing? Gone.” —Esquire “The story unfolds brilliantly, always surprisingly . . . The magic of his prose equals the horror of Johnston’s story; each somehow enhances the other . . . Read this astonishing novel.” —The Washington Post “Tim Johnston’s high-wire literary thriller . . . will leave you gasping.” —Vanity Fair “A riveting literary thriller of the can’t-stop-turning-the-page, stay-up-all-night variety.” —Alice LaPlante, author of A Circle of Wives The Rocky Mountains have cast their spell over the Courtlands, a young family from the plains taking a last summer vacation before their daughter begins college. For eighteen-year-old Caitlin, the mountains loom as the ultimate test of her runner’s heart, while her parents hope that so much beauty, so much grandeur, will somehow repair a damaged marriage. But when Caitlin and her younger brother, Sean, go out for an early morning run and only Sean returns, the mountains become as terrifying as they are majestic, as suddenly this family find themselves living the kind of nightmare they’ve only read about in headlines or seen on TV. As their world comes undone, the Courtlands are drawn into a vortex of dread and recrimination. Why weren’t they more careful? What has happened to their daughter? Is she alive? Will they ever know? Caitlin’s disappearance, all the more devastating for its mystery, is the beginning of the family’s harrowing journey down increasingly divergent and solitary paths until all that continues to bind them together are the questions they can never bring themselves to ask: At what point does a family stop searching? At what point will a girl stop fighting for her life? Written with a precision that captures every emotion, every moment of fear, as each member of the family searches for answers, Descent is a perfectly crafted thriller that races like an avalanche toward its heart-pounding conclusion, and heralds the arrival of a master storyteller.

Author: M. Eagleton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230502210
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
If the author is 'dead', if feminism is 'post-', why does the figure of the woman author keep appearing as a central character in contemporary fiction? She is concerned with ownership but, equally, with loss; determined to enter the cultural field but also rejecting that field; looking for control but subject to duplicity; seeking power alongside desire. Drawing on a diverse range of contemporary authors - including Atwood, Byatt, Brookner, Coetzee, Lurie, LeGuin, Michèle Roberts, Shields, Spark, Weldon, Walker - this study explores the complexity and continuing fascination of this figure.