Writing

Are you an author? Do you have a new book that you're looking to promote to potential new fans? Have you considered venturing out into the book signing circuit? Maybe you've thought about it for a while but haven't been sure how to go about it. Perhaps you're reluctant because you don't know what to expect. Book Signing 101: An Author's Guide gives you a simple and straightforward breakdown of everything involved in book signing events, from where to hold your event, what to have with you, what to avoid, how to save money, how to carry yourself like a professional author and much more.

This work sheds new light on the way nine women writers of Lawrence's time and ours reacted to his fiction, poetry, and criticism in their own work.

When Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in April of 1861, Walt Whitman declared it "the volcanic upheaval of the nation"--the bloody inception of a war that would dramatically alter the shape and character of American culture along with its political, racial, and social landscape. Prior to the war, America's leading writers had been integral to helping the young nation imagine itself, assert its beliefs, and realize its immense potential. When the Civil War erupted, it forced them to witness not only unimaginable human carnage on the battlefield, but also the disintegration of the foundational symbolic order they had helped to create. The war demanded new frameworks for understanding the world and new forms of communication that could engage with the immensity of the conflict. It fostered both social and cultural experimentation.

Now available in paperback, From Battlefields Rising explores the profound impact of the war on writers including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Frederick Douglass. As the writers of the time grappled with the war's impact on the individual and the national psyche, their responses multiplied and transmuted. Whitman's poetry and prose, for example, was chastened and deepened by his years spent ministering to wounded soldiers; off the battlefield, the anguish of war would come to suffuse the austere, elliptical poems that Emily Dickinson was writing from afar; and Hawthorne was rendered silent by his reading of military reports and talks with soldiers. Calling into question every prior presumption and ideal, the war forever changed America's early idealism-and consequently its literature-into something far more ambivalent and raw.

An absorbing group portrait of the period's most important writers, From Battlefields Rising flashes with forgotten historical details and elegant new ideas. It alters previous perceptions about the evolution of American literature and how Americans have understood and expressed their common history.

For Emma Rous, the natural environment offers countless ways to engage students in significant reading, writing, and thinking. She breaks down the barriers between school and life. She raises complex ethical questions. She creates a course of study her students care about.

With Literature and the Land, Rous not only inspires you to help students become environmentally literate, she provides the tools you need to make it happen. Beginning with readings and exercises about perception, the book explores a wealth of nature writing activities, the history of people's relationship with nature from mythological times to the present, case studies of current environmental issues and action projects, environmental themes in fiction and poetry, and the potential of outdoor adventure. The book is packed with descriptions of literature, classroom activities, student responses, and lists of resources. The materials are all designed to support a heterogeneous classroom, a student-centered pedagogy, and a gender-balanced curriculum.

Ideal for teachers looking for new ways to make the literature classroom both interdisciplinary and experiential, Literature and the Land is a one-of-a-kind reference-whether you're attempting to implement a single unit on nature literature or a full course of study.

With this innovative guide, writing a nonfiction book proposal that sells is both simple and intuitive. A boon to professionals who want to write and anyone who regularly works with writers: teachers, editors, publishers, and agents.

In offices across America, the Masters of Gobbledygook are hard at work. They're bombarding in-boxes with those long, confusing memos that colleagues don't have the patience to read--and bosses don't have the time to rewrite. They use words like "commence" or "prior to" instead of "begin" or "before." They bury their main point somewhere in the last paragraph--and take two pages to get there. Everybody knows one of them; in fact, you may even be one of them. But now there's help for anyone who's ever fallen prey to businessese, academese, legalese, or any other "ese" when faced with a blank memo pad.
In The Plain English Approach to Business Writing, Edward Bailey--who spent twenty years working in the bastions of bureaucratese--offers readers a powerful new communications tool. Written for busy professionals who want to improve the quality and clarity of their own (or their staff's) writing style, this no-nonsense guide is an indispensable office companion. Bailey's approach is 5urprisingly straightforward: just write as you would talk. Plain English is not only easier to read; it's also easier to write. And it's so effective that many large organizations are endorsing, if not demanding, its use in the work place. Pithy and entertaining, Bailey points out all the dos and don'ts of plain English. He then illustrates them with examples drawn from a wide array of sources, including business documents, technical manuals, trade publications like Consumer Reports, and the works of writers such as Russell Baker and John D. MacDonald. From the basics to the fine tuning, he offers practical advice on clarity and precision, organization, layout, and a host of other important writing topics.
A delightful, down-to-earth guide, The Plain English Approach to Business Writing is for professionals of all backgrounds (government, military, legal, financial, technical, corporate) and staff at all levels (from the company CEO to the ambitious secretary). The Plain English Approach to Business Writing can be read in an hour--and used for the rest of one's life.

For author Gish Jen, the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents, books were once an Outsiders' Guide to the Universe. But they were something more, too. Through her eclectic childhood reading, Jen stumbled onto a cultural phenomenon that would fuel her writing for decades to come: the profound difference in self-narration that underlies the gap often perceived between East and West.

Drawing on a rich array of sources, from paintings to behavioral studies to her father's striking account of his childhood in China, this accessible book not only illuminates Jen's own development and celebrated work but also explores the aesthetic and psychic roots of the independent and interdependent self-each mode of selfhood yielding a distinct way of observing, remembering, and narrating the world. The novel, Jen writes, is fundamentally a Western form that values originality, authenticity, and the truth of individual experience. By contrast, Eastern narrative emphasizes morality, cultural continuity, the everyday, the recurrent. In its progress from a moving evocation of one writer's life to a convincing delineation of the forces that have shaped our experience for millennia, "Tiger Writing" radically shifts the way we understand ourselves and our art-making.

Inside The Wicked Wit of Charles Dickens, readers take a journey into the classically humorous and almost goofy side of one of the most famous writers in world history. readers will find a timeline of Charles Dickens's Life, several short stories, a whole chapter of Dickens's bumblings, and quotes from some of Dickens's most famous papers.

Dickens was a wonderfully smart child who excelled in school but became a victim of poverty. In his later years, this childhood of poverty would influence him greatly and a great deal of his material was based on this life. When his father was sent to prison, Dickens's mother and siblings accompanied his father and went to live inside the prison in one small room while Charles was sent into lodgings beside the prison and worked at a blacking factory.

The Wicked Wit of Charles Dickenstakes Dickens's lovers through a history of some of his lesser-known stories and introduces the reader to a side of Dickens that may not have been seen before, the wickedly entertaining and funny side. The beautifully bound hardcover will look incredible resting on anyone's coffee table or bookshelf and can be considered a collectible book. Researched and compiled by Shelley Klein, this book is a must-have for any Classic Literature fan who is a current or former fan of Dickens.