
Meander, Spiral, Explode
Design and Pattern in Narrative
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed

Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $13.97
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Bernadette Dunne
-
By:
-
Jane Alison
About this listen
"Doctors don't imitate Galen. Why should writers follow Aristotle? Jane Alison in her fresh, original book about narrative is our new Aristotle." (Edmund White, author of The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading)
As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: "For centuries there's been one path through fiction we're most likely to travel - one we're actually told to follow - and that's the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides...But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?"
W. G. Sebald's Emigrants was the first novel to show Alison how forward momentum can be created by way of pattern, rather than the traditional arc - or, in nature, wave. Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her "museum of specimens" include Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Caryl Phillips, and Mary Robison.
Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let's leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike.
©2019 Jane Alison (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Open Veins of Latin America
- Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
- By: Eduardo Galeano, Isabel Allende - Foreward
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation.
-
-
Please up-date the addition
- By fishrock on 02-20-10
By: Eduardo Galeano, and others
-
The Situation and the Story
- The Art of Personal Narrative
- By: Vivian Gornick
- Narrated by: Vivian Gornick
- Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks—and answers. Taking us on a tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.
-
-
Excellent
- By ctl on 02-17-25
By: Vivian Gornick
-
Persuasion
- By: Jane Austen
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anne Elliot has grieved for seven years over the loss of her first love, Captain Frederick Wentworth. But events conspire to unravel the knots of deceit and misunderstanding in this beguiling and gently comic story of love and fidelity.
-
-
Juliet Stevenson is Simply Amazing
- By Em on 04-15-12
By: Jane Austen
-
The Art of Memoir
- By: Mary Karr
- Narrated by: Mary Karr
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers' experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr's own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told - and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.)
-
-
Brilliant!
- By A. Potter on 01-18-16
By: Mary Karr
-
On Writers and Writing
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margaret Atwood
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What is the role of the writer? Prophet? High priest of art? Court jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain - or excuse! - their activities, looking at what costumes they have assumed, what roles they have chosen to play. In her final chapter she takes up the challenge of the title: if a writer is to be seen as "gifted", who is doing the giving and what are the terms of the gift?
-
-
l just love Margaret Atwood.
- By Brandy Ringleb on 01-11-21
By: Margaret Atwood
-
Refuse to Be Done
- How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts
- By: Matt Bell
- Narrated by: Matthew Boston
- Length: 3 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
They say writing is rewriting. So why does the second part get such short shrift? Refuse to Be Done will guide you through every step of the novel writing process, from getting started on those first pages to the last tips for making your final draft even tighter and stronger.
-
-
many great tips
- By lauren on 06-30-24
By: Matt Bell
-
Open Veins of Latin America
- Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
- By: Eduardo Galeano, Isabel Allende - Foreward
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation.
-
-
Please up-date the addition
- By fishrock on 02-20-10
By: Eduardo Galeano, and others
-
The Situation and the Story
- The Art of Personal Narrative
- By: Vivian Gornick
- Narrated by: Vivian Gornick
- Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks—and answers. Taking us on a tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.
-
-
Excellent
- By ctl on 02-17-25
By: Vivian Gornick
-
Persuasion
- By: Jane Austen
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anne Elliot has grieved for seven years over the loss of her first love, Captain Frederick Wentworth. But events conspire to unravel the knots of deceit and misunderstanding in this beguiling and gently comic story of love and fidelity.
-
-
Juliet Stevenson is Simply Amazing
- By Em on 04-15-12
By: Jane Austen
-
The Art of Memoir
- By: Mary Karr
- Narrated by: Mary Karr
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers' experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr's own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told - and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.)
-
-
Brilliant!
- By A. Potter on 01-18-16
By: Mary Karr
-
On Writers and Writing
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margaret Atwood
- Length: 6 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
What is the role of the writer? Prophet? High priest of art? Court jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain - or excuse! - their activities, looking at what costumes they have assumed, what roles they have chosen to play. In her final chapter she takes up the challenge of the title: if a writer is to be seen as "gifted", who is doing the giving and what are the terms of the gift?
-
-
l just love Margaret Atwood.
- By Brandy Ringleb on 01-11-21
By: Margaret Atwood
-
Refuse to Be Done
- How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts
- By: Matt Bell
- Narrated by: Matthew Boston
- Length: 3 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
They say writing is rewriting. So why does the second part get such short shrift? Refuse to Be Done will guide you through every step of the novel writing process, from getting started on those first pages to the last tips for making your final draft even tighter and stronger.
-
-
many great tips
- By lauren on 06-30-24
By: Matt Bell
-
The Art of X-Ray Reading
- How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing
- By: Roy Peter Clark
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Where do writers learn their best moves? They use a technique that Roy Peter Clark calls X-ray reading, a form of reading that lets you penetrate beyond the surface of a text to see how meaning is actually being made. In The Art of X-Ray Reading, Clark invites you to don your X-ray reading glasses and join him on a guided tour through some of the most exquisite and masterful literary works of all time, from The Great Gatsby to Lolita to The Bluest Eye and many more.
-
-
So Good I Bought the Print Version
- By Jan on 04-25-16
By: Roy Peter Clark
-
One Writer's Beginnings
- By: Eudora Welty
- Narrated by: Eudora Welty
- Length: 3 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Born in 1909 in Jackson, Mississippi, Eudora Welty shares details of her upbringing that show us how her family and her surroundings contributed to the shaping not only of her personality but of her writing as well. Everyday sights, sounds, and objects resonate with the emotions of recollection.
-
-
Recording does not align with published version
- By Zoe Elena on 02-13-22
By: Eudora Welty
-
Consider This
- Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different
- By: Chuck Palahniuk
- Narrated by: Chuck Palahniuk, Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 5 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this spellbinding blend of memoir and insight, best-selling author Chuck Palahniuk shares stories and generous advice on what makes writing powerful and what makes for powerful writing. With advice grounded in years of careful study and a keenly observed life, Palahniuk combines practical advice and concrete examples from beloved classics, his own books, and a "kitchen-table MFA" culled from an evolving circle of beloved authors and artists, with anecdotes, postcards from the road, and much more.
-
-
Poetic Justice
- By Dave Green on 01-20-20
By: Chuck Palahniuk
-
Speak Memory
- An Autobiography Revisited
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.
-
-
Speak, Mnemosyne!
- By Darwin8u on 08-09-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Thunder and Lightning
- Cracking Open the Writer's Craft
- By: Natalie Goldberg
- Narrated by: Natalie Goldberg
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The challenge we face as writers, Natalie Goldberg says, begins with the process of turning inward and then trying to communicate what we find. From the secret of letting characters and stories "write themselves" to finding mentor sources and responding to criticism to writing's one essential ingredient, which is the mind - here are all-new Zen-based lessons and reflections, refined and proven at Natalie's acclaimed national writers' workshops.
-
-
Inspiring
- By StoryDtechtive on 02-11-17
By: Natalie Goldberg
-
Ted Hughes
- The Unauthorized Life
- By: Jonathan Bate
- Narrated by: Mike Grady
- Length: 25 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ted Hughes, poet laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet in history, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship, love, and life also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron.
-
-
Phenomenal thanks to narrator!
- By equinox14 on 06-26-16
By: Jonathan Bate
-
Dancing at the Edge of the World
- Thoughts on Words, Women, Places
- By: Ursula K. Le Guin
- Narrated by: Gabrielle de Cuir
- Length: 14 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From modern literature to menopause, from utopian thought to rodeos - in this classic collection of essays, Ursula K. Le Guin roves with her customary audacity over the intersecting arenas of literature, feminism, and social responsibility, exploding any received notions she comes across and revealing visionary possibilities in their stead.
-
-
Not my favorite Le Guin collection, but...
- By Cameron on 05-11-19
-
Artful
- By: Ali Smith
- Narrated by: Ali Smith
- Length: 4 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 2012, Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College, Oxford. Those lectures, presented here, took the shape of discursive stories that refused to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form. Thus, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted - literally - by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature. A hypnotic dialogue unfolds between storytelling and a meditation on art that encompasses love, grief, memory, and revitalization.
-
-
#Reality/Loss/Mythology
- By Ellen K. on 11-14-18
By: Ali Smith
-
Still Writing
- The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life
- By: Dani Shapiro
- Narrated by: Dani Shapiro
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From Dani Shapiro, best-selling author of Devotion and Slow Motion, comes a witty, heartfelt, and practical look at the exhilarating and challenging process of storytelling. At once a memoir, a meditation on the artistic process, and advice on craft, Still Writing is an intimate companion to living a creative life. Writers - and anyone with an artistic temperament - will find inspiration and comfort here.
-
-
Inspiring but dark, better to read than listen
- By Raquel on 10-22-21
By: Dani Shapiro
-
Istanbul
- Memories and the City
- By: Orhan Pamuk
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A shimmering evocation, by turns intimate and panoramic, of one of the world’s great cities, by its foremost writer. Orhan Pamuk was born in Istanbul and still lives in the family apartment building where his mother first held him in her arms. His portrait of his city is thus also a self-portrait, refracted by memory and the melancholy—or hüzün—that all Istanbullus share.
-
-
Terrible pronunciation
- By K. Jaynes on 02-25-18
By: Orhan Pamuk
-
Changing My Mind
- Occasional Essays
- By: Zadie Smith
- Narrated by: Barbara Rosenblat
- Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Split into five sections - Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering - Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays, some published here for the first time, reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians, and Italian divas. Changing My Mind is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent, and funny - a gift to readers and writers both.
-
-
There may be truths on the side of life
- By Darwin8u on 02-18-20
By: Zadie Smith
-
All the Lives We Ever Lived
- Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf
- By: Katharine Smyth
- Narrated by: Brittany Pressley
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death - a calamity that claimed her favorite person - she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding her own grief. Through her inventive, highly personal reading of To the Lighthouse, Smyth guides us toward a new vision of Woolf’s most demanding and rewarding novel.
-
-
Surprised I Finished This
- By Amazon Customer on 03-25-22
By: Katharine Smyth
Critic reviews
A Publishers Weekly Pick of Most Anticipated Book of the Season.
A Chicago Review of Books Pick of Best New Book of the Month.
A Nylon Magazine Pick of Great New Books.
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Refuse to Be Done
- How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts
- By: Matt Bell
- Narrated by: Matthew Boston
- Length: 3 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
They say writing is rewriting. So why does the second part get such short shrift? Refuse to Be Done will guide you through every step of the novel writing process, from getting started on those first pages to the last tips for making your final draft even tighter and stronger.
-
-
many great tips
- By lauren on 06-30-24
By: Matt Bell
-
The Situation and the Story
- The Art of Personal Narrative
- By: Vivian Gornick
- Narrated by: Vivian Gornick
- Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks—and answers. Taking us on a tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.
-
-
Excellent
- By ctl on 02-17-25
By: Vivian Gornick
-
The Emotional Craft of Fiction
- How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface
- By: Donald Maass
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
While writers might disagree over showing versus telling or plotting versus pantsing, none would argue this: If you want to write strong fiction, you must make your readers feel. The reader's experience must be an emotional journey of its own, one as involving as your characters' struggles, discoveries, and triumphs are for you. That's where The Emotional Craft of Fiction comes in. Veteran literary agent and expert fiction instructor Donald Maass shows you how to use story to provoke a visceral and emotional experience in readers.
-
-
Read this if you're a writer
- By Reed Ramlow on 08-08-20
By: Donald Maass
-
The Science of Storytelling
- By: Will Storr
- Narrated by: James Clamp
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How do master storytellers compel us? There have been many attempts to understand what makes a good story, but few have used a scientific approach. In The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr applies dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to our myths and archetypes to show how we can tell better stories, revealing, among other things, how storytellers - and also our brains - create worlds by being attuned to moments of unexpected change.
-
-
A great portal into human psychology
- By Stephanie Romer on 02-13-21
By: Will Storr
-
Bird by Bird
- Some Instructions on Writing and Life
- By: Anne Lamott
- Narrated by: Anne Lamott
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For a quarter century, more than a million readers and listeners—scribes and scribblers of all ages and abilities—have been inspired by Anne Lamott’s hilarious, big-hearted, homespun advice. Advice that begins with the simple words of wisdom passed down from Anne’s father—also a writer—in the iconic passage that gives the book its title.
-
-
Why oh why did she narrate this?!
- By Amor Fati on 01-02-23
By: Anne Lamott
-
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
- By: Omar El Akkad
- Narrated by: Omar El Akkad
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege.
-
-
Outstanding - Should be required reading
- By Steve Siegmund on 03-19-25
By: Omar El Akkad
-
Refuse to Be Done
- How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts
- By: Matt Bell
- Narrated by: Matthew Boston
- Length: 3 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
They say writing is rewriting. So why does the second part get such short shrift? Refuse to Be Done will guide you through every step of the novel writing process, from getting started on those first pages to the last tips for making your final draft even tighter and stronger.
-
-
many great tips
- By lauren on 06-30-24
By: Matt Bell
-
The Situation and the Story
- The Art of Personal Narrative
- By: Vivian Gornick
- Narrated by: Vivian Gornick
- Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks—and answers. Taking us on a tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.
-
-
Excellent
- By ctl on 02-17-25
By: Vivian Gornick
-
The Emotional Craft of Fiction
- How to Write the Story Beneath the Surface
- By: Donald Maass
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
While writers might disagree over showing versus telling or plotting versus pantsing, none would argue this: If you want to write strong fiction, you must make your readers feel. The reader's experience must be an emotional journey of its own, one as involving as your characters' struggles, discoveries, and triumphs are for you. That's where The Emotional Craft of Fiction comes in. Veteran literary agent and expert fiction instructor Donald Maass shows you how to use story to provoke a visceral and emotional experience in readers.
-
-
Read this if you're a writer
- By Reed Ramlow on 08-08-20
By: Donald Maass
-
The Science of Storytelling
- By: Will Storr
- Narrated by: James Clamp
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
How do master storytellers compel us? There have been many attempts to understand what makes a good story, but few have used a scientific approach. In The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr applies dazzling psychological research and cutting-edge neuroscience to our myths and archetypes to show how we can tell better stories, revealing, among other things, how storytellers - and also our brains - create worlds by being attuned to moments of unexpected change.
-
-
A great portal into human psychology
- By Stephanie Romer on 02-13-21
By: Will Storr
-
Bird by Bird
- Some Instructions on Writing and Life
- By: Anne Lamott
- Narrated by: Anne Lamott
- Length: 6 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For a quarter century, more than a million readers and listeners—scribes and scribblers of all ages and abilities—have been inspired by Anne Lamott’s hilarious, big-hearted, homespun advice. Advice that begins with the simple words of wisdom passed down from Anne’s father—also a writer—in the iconic passage that gives the book its title.
-
-
Why oh why did she narrate this?!
- By Amor Fati on 01-02-23
By: Anne Lamott
-
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
- By: Omar El Akkad
- Narrated by: Omar El Akkad
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or Muslims or immigrants, but whoever falls outside the boundaries of privilege.
-
-
Outstanding - Should be required reading
- By Steve Siegmund on 03-19-25
By: Omar El Akkad
intriguing perspective about narrative forms
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Needs to be read many times.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
All covid shut down I've been devouring books on writing and the writing life. This one needs further exploration! All the other books trumpeted similar techniques and thoughts, this came at the subject in ways I hadn't seen any of the others do.
Hopefully a movement of writers creates a collective and pushes these theories further and purposefully. While she admits most of these patterns come about subconsciously, formed as if by nature, I believe that one could set out to do this on purpose to create a compelling narrative. Hopefully this book starts getting taught in mfa classes and you see people swell around these ideas.
TL;DR
Aristotle's 3 act structure wasn't meant for the novel. There are more varied and better structures to be explored. Look to nature, and find life's patterns.
Maybe changed my writing life
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Interesting
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Interesting, but print highly recommended.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
Thought-provoking examination of narrative
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.