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Related: reading and writing36 Writing Essays by Chuck Palahniuk 1: Establishing Your Authority Chuck teaches two principal methods for building a narrative voice your readers will believe in. Discover the Heart Method and the Head Method and how to employ each to greatest effect. 2: Developing a Theme
Camus's "The Stranger": First-Line Translation For the modern American reader, few lines in French literature are as famous as the opening of Albert Camus’s “L’Étranger”: “Aujourd’hui, maman est morte.” Nitty-gritty tense issues aside, the first sentence of “The Stranger” is so elementary that even a schoolboy with a base knowledge of French could adequately translate it. So why do the pros keep getting it wrong? Within the novel’s first sentence, two subtle and seemingly minor translation decisions have the power to change the way we read everything that follows. What makes these particular choices prickly is that they poke at a long-standing debate among the literary community: whether it is necessary for a translator to have some sort of special affinity with a work’s author in order to produce the best possible text.
15 Books You Should Have Read in 2010 - Culture Image by Jane Mount, Courtesy 20x200 Yes, we read Freedom this year and yes, it was good. As Esquire put it, it “was one great slab of a book, at a time when most books have given up on greatness.” But there were other books in 2010, books that had to compete for our ever more challenged attention spans and won.
Your Daily Life in GIFs When you get caught making fun of someone behind their back: When a hot girl walks by a group of guys: When your hair just won't do what you want: When you make a reference to something funny and no one gets it: When you hear the words ‘food’ and ‘ready’ together: When your friends make a joke about you:
The 100 Best Books of All Time Many publishers have lists of 100 best books, defined by their own criteria. This article enumerates some lists of "100 best" books for which there are fuller articles. Among them, Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (Xanadu, 1985) and Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels (Grafton, 1988) are collections of 100 short essays by a single author, David Pringle, with moderately long critical introductory chapters also by Pringle.
25 Insights on Becoming a Better Writer When George Plimpton asked Ernest Hemingway what the best training for an aspiring writer would be in a 1954 interview, Hem replied, “Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.” Today, writing well is more important than ever. William Gibson on Why Sci-Fi Writers Are (Thankfully) Almost Always Wrong Author William Gibson poses for a portrait at the Last Bookstore in Los Angeles.Photo: Jason Redmond/Wired William Gibson, one of science fiction’s most visionary and distinctive voices, maintains that he and his fellow writers don’t possess some mystical ability to peer into the future. “We’re almost always wrong,” said Gibson in a phone interview with Wired. Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his 1982 short story “Burning Chrome” and expanded on the concept in his 1984 debut novel, Neuromancer. In that book, which quickly became a classic, inspiring pop culture and science fiction for decades to come, Gibson predicted that the “consensual hallucination” of cyberspace would be “experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation” in a global network of “unthinkable complexity.”
Top 25 Best Fantasy Books This one is full to the brim with gritty, amoral, cynical dark humor. A different sort of fantasy, but one that's extremely refreshing, disturbing, and entertaining -- one of the best fantasy reads to come out the past couple years. Even as we near 2015, The Prince of Thorns still stands tall among other strong fantasy books. For a dark, gritty, anti-hero driven fantasy, I felt strong Abercrombie vibes. Popsicles! Not to sound full of myself, but I’m pretty sure this is the be all, end all of popsicle roundups. There’s a little something for everyone: the foodies, the purists, the ones who prefer frozen yogurt, the ones who prefer a little alcohol, everyone. Tweny-five options to be exact. The post I did last summer on the cold guys was one of DC’s most viewed ever, so I thought you’d all be up for another round – was I right? Click on the photo to be taken to the recipe.
General Fiction Getting Around... Career Essentials Getting Started Queries & Manuscripts Market Research Classes & Conferences Critiquing Crafting Your Work Grammar Guides Research/Interviewing Writing Contests The Writing Business Income & Expenses Selling Reprints Collaboration Pseudonyms Negotiating Contracts Setting Fees/Getting Paid Rights & Copyright Tech Tools The Writing Life The Writing Life Rejection/Writer's Block Health & Safety Time ManagementColumn: Ramblings on the Writing Life Tragedy's decline and fall King Oedipus appears at the door of his palace to listen to the Chorus of Old Men of Thebes, who have come to him in their time of terrible trouble. They are asking for his help, they say, not because they think of him “as a god”: . . . but rather judging you the first of men in all the chances of this life and when we mortals have to do with more than man. It turns out that, unwittingly (as more or less everything in the play is unwitting), the Chorus is right. Oedipus alone can help. The cause of the trouble is himself; the chances he has had in his life are precisely the source of the plague.
The 16 Best Dystopian Books Of All Time Dystopian novels—stories of the horrific future—are so common as to be almost forgettable. Here is a compilation of what I believe are the 16 greatest of the genre. I could happily list twice as many that are amazing, but these are the best. From the post-apocalyptic wasteland to deadly viruses to social malaise, all possible bad futures end here.