Author: Richard Cohen File Type: epub For anyone who has ever identified with a hero or heroine, been seduced by a strong opening sentence, or been powerfully moved by a storys end, How to Write Like Tolstoyis a thought-provoking journeyinside the minds of the worlds most accomplished storytellers, from Shakespeare to Stephen King. I have tried, as far as possible using the words of the authors themselves, to explain their craft, aiming to take readers on a journey into the concerns, techniques, tricks, flaws, and, occasionally, obsessions of our most luminous writers.from the Preface Behind every acclaimed work of literature is a trove of heartfelt decisions. The best authors put painstakingsometimes obsessiveeffort into each element of their stories, from plot and character development to dialogue and point of view. What made Nabokov choose the name Lolita? Why did Fitzgerald use first-person narration inThe Great Gatsby? How did Kerouac, who raged against revision, finally come to reviseOn the Road?Veteran editor and teacher RichardCohen draws on his vast reservoir of a lifetimes reading and his insight into what makes good prose soar. Here are Gabriel Garcia Marquezs thoughts on how to start a novel (In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book) Virginia Woolf offering her definition of style (It is all rhythm. Once you get that, you cant use the wrong words) and Vladimir Nabokov on the nature of fiction (All great novels are great fairy tales). Cohen has researched the published works and private utterances of our greatest authors to discover the elements that made their prose memorable. The result is a unique exploration of the act and art of writing that enriches our experience of reading both the classics and the best modern fiction. Evoking the marvelous, the famous, and the irreverent, he reveals the challenges that even the greatest writers facedand shows us how they surmounted them. Praise for *How to Write Like Tolstoy* The highest compliment one can pay How to Write Like Tolstoy is that it provokes an overwhelming urge to read and write, to be in dialogue or even doomed competition with the greatest creative minds . . . . That Mr. Cohen is an editor, that his love of literature comes in large part from awe in the presence of better writers than he, is no small matter. His love is infectious, and regardless of how well he ends up teaching us to write, that is miracle enough.*Wall Street Journal* This book is a wry, critical friend to both writer and reader. It is filled with cogent examples and provoking statements. You will agree or quarrel with each page, and be a sharper writer and reader by the end.**Hilary Mantel These twelve essays are like twelve perfect university lectures on the craft of writing fiction. The professoror, in this case, authorsucceeds in being not only knowledgeable but also interesting, charming, and engaging.Library Journal (starred review)** Insightful . . . [Cohen] escorts his readers to Iris Murdoch for sage counsel on launching a novel, to Salman Rushdie for shrewd guidance on developing an unreliable narrator, to Rudyard Kipling for a cagey hint on creating memorable minor characters, and to Leo Tolstoy for a masters help in transforming personal experience into fictional art.*Booklist hrLush and instructive . . . [Cohen] is a generous tour guide through his literary world.*Kirkus Reviews***ReviewThe highest compliment one can payHow to Write Like Tolstoyis that it provokes an overwhelming urge to read and write, to be in dialogue or even doomed competition with the greatest creative minds . . . . That Mr. Cohen is an editor, that his love of literature comes in large part from awe in the presence of better writers than he, is no small matter. His love is infectious, and regardless of how well he ends up teaching us to write, that is miracle enough.*Wall Street Journal* This book is a wry, critical friend to both writer and reader. It is filled with cogent examples and provoking statements. You will agree or quarrel with each page, and be a sharper writer and reader by the end.Hilary Mantel These twelve essays are like twelve perfect university lectures on the craft of writing fiction. The professoror, in this case, authorsucceeds in being not only knowledgeable but also interesting, charming, and engaging. . . . [Richard] Cohen reveals the possibilities that lie in wait when authors practice selection and intention, sparking the literary imagination.Library Journal (starred review) Insightful . . . [Cohen] escorts his readers to Iris Murdoch for sage counsel on launching a novel, to Salman Rushdie for shrewd guidance on developing an unreliable narrator, to Rudyard Kipling for a cagey hint on creating memorable minor characters, and to Leo Tolstoy for a masters help in transforming personal experience into fictional art. Even readers with no intentions of writing a novel will relish the opportunity to join their favorite authors at the workbench.Booklist An elegant, chatty how-to book on writing well, using the lessons of many of the worlds best writers . . . [Cohen] draws on plentiful advice from past and present literary titans. . . . The process of gathering advice from prominent contemporary authors such as Francine Prose, Jonathan Franzen, and Nick Hornby gives Cohen the opportunity to tell any number of amusing, often discursive stories about great literature and authors, mixed with the writers own observations.Publishers Weekly Lush and instructive . . . [Cohen] is a generous tour guide through his literary world.Kirkus Reviews**About the Author Richard Cohenis the former publishing director of Hutchinson and Hodder & Stoughton and the founder of Richard Cohen Books. Works that he has edited have gone on to win the Pulitzer, Booker, and WhitbreadCosta prizes, and more than twenty have been #1 bestsellers. The author of By the Sword, an award-winning history of swordplay, and Chasing the Sun, a wide-ranging narrative account of the star that gives us life, he was for two years program director of the Cheltenham Festival of Literature and for seven years a visiting professor in creative writing at the University of Kingston-upon-Thames. He has written forThe New York Timesand most leading London newspapers, and is currently at work on a history of historians. He lives in New York City.

Author: Gerald Vizenor File Type: pdf Gerald Vizenors Native Provenance challenges readers to consider the subtle ironies at the heart of Native American culture and oral traditions such as creation and trickster stories and dream songs. A respected authority in the study of Native American literature and intellectual history, Vizenor believes that the protean nature of many creation stories, with their tease and weave of ironic gestures, was lost or obfuscated in inferior translations by scholars and cultural connoisseurs, and as a result the underlying theories and presuppositions of these renditions persist in popular literature and culture. Native Provenance explores more than two centuries of such betrayal of native creativity. With erudite and sweeping virtuosity, Vizenor examines how ethnographers and others converted the inherent confidence of native stories into uneasy sentiments of victimry. He explores the connection between Native Americans and Jews through gossip theory and strategies of cultural survivance, and between natural motion and ordinary practices of survivance. Other topics include the unique element of native liberty inherent in artistic milieus the genre of visionary narratives of resistance and the notions of historical absence, cultural nihilism, and victimry. Native Provenance is a tour de force of Native American cultural criticism ranging widely across the terrains of the artistic, literary, philosophical, linguistic, historical, ethnographic, and sociological aspects of interpreting native stories. Native Provenance is rife with poignant and original observations and is essential reading for anyone interested in Native American cultures and literature.Review Poet, novelist, and critic Gerald Vizenor is arguablythe most accomplished and prolific intellectual in the field of Native American studies. . . . Vizenors crucial and liberating theories on Survivance, natural reason, the Postindian, and other matters are highly influential in the field. . . . The world needs more independent minds of Vizenors caliber.Michael Snyder, Great Plains Quarterly (Michael Snyder Great Plains Quarterly 2019-02-23) About the Author Gerald Vizenor is a novelist, essayist, and interdisciplinary scholar of Native American culture and literature. He is professor emeritus of American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author or editor of more than thirty books, including Native Liberty Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (Nebraska, 2009), and three recent novels, Chair of Tears (Nebraska, 2012), Blue Ravens , and Native Tributes.