The Writer and the People


Book Description

Originally published in 1965, The Writer and the People was one of the key books in the revitalization and invigoration of the young Left in late-1960s Italy. Aiming to demystify the myth of populism, Alberto Asor Rosa takes on Marxism and its legacy, the relationship between Fascism and the Left, the prospects for militant anti-Fascism, and more. He does so through detailed reconstructions, analyses, and critiques of some of the central figures of modern Italian literature, including Giovanni Verga, Carlo Casola, Antonio Gramsci, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Translated into English for the first time, The Writer and the People is both a historical text, helping us understand postwar Italian politics and society, and a living document, able to educate and inspire left-wing activists today.




A Writer's People


Book Description

Part meditation, part remembrance, A Writer’s People by V. S. Naipaul is a privileged insight, full of gentleness, humour and feeling, into the mind of one of our greatest writers. For the ‘serious traveller’, one who is fully engaged with the world, there can be no single view. Our author’s purpose, then, ‘is not literary criticism or biography’, but only to set out the writing and ways of seeing to which he was exposed. So here is colonial Trinidad (the early Derek Walcott and Naipaul’s own father); the culture of school (Flaubert and the classical world); England, where with the help of friends the writer seeks to make his way; and, inevitably for a colonial Indian, there is India, to be approached through the residue of Indian culture and the scattered memories of nineteenth-century immigrants, leading to a special understanding of Mahatma Gandhi.




Reading Like a Writer


Book Description

In her entertaining and edifying New York Times bestseller, acclaimed author Francine Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and tricks of the masters to discover why their work has endured. Written with passion, humour and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart – to take pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; to look to John le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue and to Flannery O’ Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail; to be inspired by Emily Brontë ’ s structural nuance and Charles Dickens’ s deceptively simple narrative techniques. Most importantly, Prose cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which all literature is crafted, and reminds us that good writing comes out of good reading.




The People's Writer


Book Description

Most critics have considered Caldwell to be only a minor southern writer, often associating him with his worst writing. Yet Saul Bellow suggested he deserved the Nobel Prize, and William Faulkner once characterized him as one of the five best writers of his time, alongside himself, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos.




My Letters to Dead People


Book Description

Harvey Milk, Larry Itliong, John Lennon, Woody Guthrie... My Letters to Dead People is legendary political consultant Richie Ross s epistolary exploration into dozens of historical, personal, professional and influential figures of the last 40 years. First, a star with Cesar Chavez. Then, a young campaign hot shot in the Leo McCarthy-Howard Berman speakership war. And, eventually, dubbed by the California Journal as Willie Brown s warlord. Richie Ross has come a long way from his early days working street-level on campaigns, night clerking for free rent just north of San Francisco s Tenderloin, and growing up with kids from housing projects as they held him down and took turns pissing on him. Since then, he has been involved in hundreds of campaigns at every level of government. A former chief of staff for California s legendary Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, Ross has worked as a union organizer for the United Farm Workers and a strategist for the hotel workers union.




Heart Berries


Book Description

A powerful, poetic memoir of an Indigenous woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest—this New York Times bestseller and Emma Watson Book Club pick is “an illuminating account of grief, abuse and the complex nature of the Native experience . . . at once raw and achingly beautiful (NPR). Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder, Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father―an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist―who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame. Mailhot trusts the reader to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept. Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story, and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people, and to her place in the world.




The Writer


Book Description




Speaking for the People


Book Description

In Speaking for the People Mark Rifkin examines nineteenth-century Native writings to reframe contemporary debates around Indigenous recognition, refusal, and resurgence. Rifkin shows how works by Native authors (William Apess, Elias Boudinot, Sarah Winnemucca, and Zitkala-Ša) illustrate the intellectual labor involved in representing modes of Indigenous political identity and placemaking. These writers highlight the complex processes involved in negotiating the character, contours, and scope of Indigenous sovereignties under ongoing colonial occupation. Rifkin argues that attending to these writers' engagements with non-native publics helps provide further analytical tools for addressing the complexities of Indigenous governance on the ground—both then and now. Thinking about Native peoplehood and politics as a matter of form opens possibilities for addressing the difficult work involved in navigating among varied possibilities for conceptualizing and enacting peoplehood in the context of continuing settler intervention. As Rifkin demonstrates, attending to writings by these Indigenous intellectuals provides ways of understanding Native governance as a matter of deliberation, discussion, and debate, emphasizing the open-ended unfinishedness of self-determination.




Creative Writing


Book Description

Crammed with crucial facts, ideas, and warnings never before brought together into clear focus, this guide is not only fun to read, but also work-boots practical. Not only inspiring, but pinch-penny accurate, it is an energizing tonic for writers' weary brain cells. *Lightning Print On Demand Title




Understanding Young People's Writing Development


Book Description

This collection offers an inclusive, multifaceted look at individual students’ patterns of writing trajectories, as well as their development of an identity as a writer. Building on rare longitudinal research, this translated text explores how adolescents learn subjects through writing and learn writing through subjects. Contributors consider issues relating to different forms of writing and grapple with students’ ambivalence or resistance to this at school, together offering an examination of how the education system can rise to the challenge of offering today’s students meaningful and appropriate writing instruction. Bringing knowledge from writing researchers and educational researchers together, Understanding Young People’s Writing Development explores: Young adults’ complicated experiences with the school writing project Practices, purposes, and identification in student note writing Knowledge construction in writing as experience and educational aim The pedagogical challenges and perspectives of writing and writer development Creativity as experience and potential in writing development The impact of digital technologies and media on student writing Using students’ work to aid the understanding of practice, this book will help highlight the importance of viewing individual writer developments from a social, institutional, and societal context, and raise questions that will advance writing pedagogy and the teaching and learning of school subjects.