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The Way of the Writer
- Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
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Publisher's summary
An award-winning novelist, philosopher, essayist, screenwriter, professor, and cartoonist, Charles Johnson has devoted his life to creative pursuit. His 1990 National Book Award-winning novel Middle Passage is a modern classic, revered as much for its daring plot as its philosophical underpinnings.
For 33 years Johnson taught and mentored students in the art and craft of creative writing. The Way of the Writer is his record of those years and the coda to a kaleidoscopic, boundary-shattering career. Organized into six accessible, easy-to-navigate sections, The Way of the Writer is both a literary reflection on the creative impulse and a utilitarian guide to the writing process. Johnson shares his lessons and exercises from the classroom, starting with word choice, sentence structure, and narrative voice and delving into the mechanics of scene, dialogue, plot, and storytelling before exploring the larger questions at stake for the serious writer: What separates literature from industrial fiction? What lies at the heart of the creative impulse? How does one navigate the literary world? And how are philosophy and fiction concomitant?
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Ranging widely from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings, Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. He sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision, resulting in nothing less than a philosophy of the novel, which has won critical acclaim nationwide, from the San Francisco Chronicle to the New York Times Book Review.
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Educational!
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C. S. Lewis - A Life
- Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet
- By: Alister E. McGrath
- Narrated by: Robin Sachs
- Length: 13 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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In honor of the 50th anniversary of C. S. Lewis' death, celebrated Oxford don Dr. Alister McGrath presents us with a compelling and definitive portrait of the life of C. S. Lewis, the author of the well-known Narnia series. For more than half a century, C. S. Lewis’ Narnia series has captured the imaginations of millions. In C. S. Lewis - A Life, Dr. Alister McGrath recounts the unlikely path of this Oxford don, who spent his days teaching English literature to the brightest students in the world and his spare time writing.
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Awakening my curiosity and desire to read more!
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Cultural Amnesia
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From Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, via Charles de Gaulle, Hitler, Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin, this varied and unfailingly absorbing book is both story and history, both public memoir and personal record - and provides an essential field-guide to the vast movements of taste, intellect, politics and delusion that helped to prepare the times we live in now.
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Very enjoyable and well narrated
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By: Clive James
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Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story
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- By: D. T. Max
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 12 hrs and 25 mins
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David Foster Wallace was the leading literary light of his generation, a man who not only captivated readers with his prose but also mesmerized them with his brilliant mind. In this, the first biography of the writer, D. T. Max sets out to chart Wallace’s tormented, anguished, and often triumphant battle to succeed as a novelist as he fights off depression and addiction to emerge with his masterpiece, Infinite Jest.
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Max avoids hagiography or a sycophant's biography
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By: D. T. Max
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The Fellowship
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C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J. R. R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met weekly in Lewis' Oxford rooms and a nearby pub. They read aloud from works in progress, argued about anything that caught their fancy, and gave one another invaluable companionship, inspiration, and criticism.
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If You Love Literature...
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The Stephen King Companion
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- Length: 24 hrs and 21 mins
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Performance
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The Stephen King Companion is an authoritative look at horror author King's personal life and professional career, from Carrie to The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. King expert George Beahm, who has published extensively about Maine's main author, is your seasoned guide to the imaginative world of Stephen King, covering his varied and prodigious output: juvenalia, short fiction, limited edition books, best-selling novels, and film adaptations.
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A Kingopedia: Books, Movies, Bio and Art
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Butterfly in the Typewriter
- The Tragic Life of John Kennedy Toole and the Remarkable Story of a Confederacy of Dunces
- By: Cory MacLauchlin
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The saga of John Kennedy Toole is one of the greatest stories of American literary history. In Butterfly in the Typewriter, Cory MacLauchlin draws on scores of new interviews with friends, family, and colleagues as well as full access to the extensive Toole archive at Tulane University, capturing his upbringing in New Orleans, his years in New York City, his frenzy of writing in Puerto Rico, his return to his beloved city, and his descent into paranoia and depression.
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Worth it! Good biography. Informative.
- By French Quarter on 07-09-13
By: Cory MacLauchlin
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Metaphysical Animals
- How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life
- By: Clare Mac Cumhaill, Rachae Wiseman
- Narrated by: Alex Dunmore
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
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Overall
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Performance
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The history of European philosophy is usually constructed from the work of men. In Metaphysical Animals, a pioneering group biography, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman offer a compelling alternative. In the mid-twentieth century Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch were philosophy students at Oxford when most male undergraduates and many tutors were conscripted away to fight in the Second World War. Together, these young women, all friends, developed a philosophy that could respond to the war’s darkest revelations.
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Book about nothing
- By Gerardo Naranjo Gonzalez on 06-14-22
By: Clare Mac Cumhaill, and others
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Poetry in Person
- Twenty-five Years of Conversation with America's Poets
- By: Lucille Clifton, Alexander Neubauer - editor, Eamon Grennan, and others
- Narrated by: Alexander Neubauer
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
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This first audio edition of Poetry in Person: 25 Years of Conversation with America’s Poets (Knopf, 2010), invites listeners into an intimate classroom with eight acclaimed poets. Full of compelling, in-depth conversation about manuscripts and drafts by the poets themselves, plus readings of the finished poems, these historic recordings offer one of the most detailed portraits ever produced of how poems are actually made.
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Fascinating
- By d on 08-28-16
By: Lucille Clifton, and others
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What listeners say about The Way of the Writer
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- Michael Thomas
- 02-16-24
Awesome!
I appreciated the overarching perspective about being a writer! This inspired me to do more writing.
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