Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1999-10-04
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £9.99
Price: £4.94
Review Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories / Faber and Faber:
Publication date: 2008-05-13
RRP: £7.99
Price: £7.49
Review A Gift from the Gallowgate / Birlinn Ltd:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2005-09-05
Dewey code: 809
RRP: £8.99
Price: £0.01
Review Fathers and Sons / Headline Review:
Publication date: 2007-11-01
RRP: £20.00
Price: £8.99
Review Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling 1865-1900 / Little, Brown:
Creator: Stephen Robson
Publication date: 2004-09-01
Dewey code: 809
RRP: £14.99
Price: £20.86
Review Beatrix Potter: At Home in the Lake District / Frances Lincoln:
Publication date: 2000-10-03
Price: £16.99
Review On Writing / Hodder & Stoughton Ltd:Short and snappy as it is, Stephen King's On Writing really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists. The memoir is terrific stuff, a vivid description of how a writer grew out of a misbehaving kid. You're right there with the young author as he's tormented by poison ivy, gas-passing babysitters, uptight schoolmarms and a laundry job nastier than Jack London's. It's a ripping yarn that casts a sharp light on his fiction. This was a child who dug Yvette Vickers from Attack of the Giant Leeches, not Sandra Dee. "I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash. " But massive reading on all literary levels was a craving just as crucial, and soon King was the published author of "I Was a Teen-Age Graverobber". As a young adult raising a family in a trailer, King started a story inspired by his stint as a caretaker cleaning a high-school girls' locker room. He crumpled it up, but his writer wife retrieved it from the trash, and using her advice about the girl milieu and his own memories of two reviled teenage classmates who died young, he came up with Carrie. King gives us lots of revelations about his life and work. [+]The kidnapper character in Misery, the mind-possessing monsters in The Tommyknockers, and the haunting of the blocked writer in The Shining symbolised his cocaine and booze addiction (overcome thanks to his wife's intervention, which he describes). "There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing. " King also evokes his college days and his recovery from the van crash that nearly killed him, but the focus is always on what it all means to the craft. He gives you a whole writer's "tool kit": a reading list, writing assignments, a corrected story and nuts-and-bolts advice on dollars and cents, plot and character, the basic building block of the paragraph, and literary models. He shows what you can learn from HP Lovecraft's arcane vocabulary, Hemingway's leanness, Grisham's authenticity, Richard Dooling's artful obscenity, Jonathan Kellerman's sentence fragments. He explains why Kellerman's Hart's War is a great story marred by a tin ear for dialogue, and how Elmore Leonard's Be Cool could be the antidote. King isn't just a writer, he's a true teacher. -Tim Appelo.
Publication date: 2000-02-22
Dewey code: 811.54
RRP: £7.99
Price: £3.94
Review Actual Air / Open City Books,US:
Edition: English-language Ed
Publication date: 2007-05-01
Dewey code: 809.89287
RRP: £14.95
Price: £6.49
Review Women Who Write / Merrell Publishers Ltd:
Creator: James Kirkup
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 2006-08-31
RRP: £11.99
Price: £7.31
Review Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Penguin Modern Classics) / Penguin Classics:
Publication date: 2007-11-02
Dewey code: 821.92
RRP: £8.99
Price: £3.57
Review Public Dream / Picador:
Publication date: 2005-11-03
RRP: £7.99
Price: £2.94
Review The Invention of Solitude / Faber and Faber:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1997-09-04
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £10.99
Price: £7.69
Review Damned to Fame: Life of Samuel Beckett / Bloomsbury Publishing PLC:Samuel Beckett, a talent so exceptional that he created masterpieces in both French and English, shied away from the limelight for much of his life. However, in this amazing biography James Knowlson shows Beckett wasn't completely reluctant to talk about himself; the book relies heavily on interviews with Beckett to reconstruct the writer's dizzying career. Knowlson fills the pages with exhaustive detail-some major, some minor. In addition, he analyzes the influences on and evolution of Beckett's work. Through it all a larger picture emerges, one of the artist at work and in life. Damned to Fame is a necessary addition to any study of Beckett.
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 2000-10-05
Dewey code: 790
RRP: £7.99
Price: £3.55
Review My Movie Business / Black Swan:John Irving is one of America's most widely read contemporary novelists, a man Peter Matthiessen has described as, "probably the greatest storyteller of American literature today". At a 1981 talk in New York, Irving mentioned working as technical director on the movie of his most famous novel, The World According to Garp. Asked about his views on the transition of his work from page to screen, he replied that faithful translation was impossible and that the process didn't interest him: "Why spend three to four years writing, and then another three to four trying to convert it to a less-perfect medium?" He also divulges here that he himself is "not a moviegoer. " It's perhaps odd then that he's embarked on, and documented, an "almost fourteen year odyssey to see The Cider House Rules made into a movie". Not only that, he's written the screenplay to both this and another of his novels, A Son of the Circus. My Movie Business is essentially about making the screen version of The Cider House Rules. As such, it's concerned primarily with the intricacies of condensing a 500-plus page novel into two hours of screen time, discussing necessary adaptations of the plotline, the treatment or cutting of characters and the shooting of specific scenes. This will be of interest to other writers, film buffs and fans or students of Irving. But this book's not only about writing screenplays. Irving's digressions are what make it interesting to a wider audience. [+]He writes in detail on the main subject of The Cider House Rules, obstetrics and abortion (chapter titles include "Rubber Gloves" and "The Disintegrating Uterus"), describing one of the narrative's two main protagonists, Doctor Larch, as "a polemicist raving against an entrenched moral doctrine of his day". Irving himself continues the pro-choice polemic, and more aggressively than Larch: "Let doctors practice medicine. Let religious zealots practice their religion, but let them keep their religion to themselves". However, not all the subjects on which Irving touches are as intense or controversial. He deliberately follows a narrative path that's "circuitous or serpentine, that wanders far afield". His anecdotes comprise many of the most intriguing passages of the book: from his grandfather's ribald poetry, to his hectic, improbable-sounding account of the filmmaker Martin Bell being bitten on the face by a rabid chimp while researching a documentary on Indian circus dwarfs. The whole amounts to an insightful slice of opinion and autobiography. -Martin Drewe.
Creator: Stephen Games
Publication date: 2006-06-05
Dewey code: 820
RRP: £14.99
Price: £7.99
Review Trains and Buttered Toast: Selected Radio Talks / John Murray:
Creator: George Bernard Shaw
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1980-04-17
Price: £6.99
Review The Autobiography of a Super Tramp (Oxford Paperbacks) / Oxford University Press:
Publication date: 2005-05-06
RRP: £1.50
Price: £2.99
Review Happy Birthday, Jack Nicholson (Pocket Penguins) / Penguin Books Ltd:
Creator: Quentin Bell
Publication date: 2008-09-04
RRP: £11.99
Price: £5.79
Review Selected Diaries / Vintage Classics:
Publication date: 2008-07-17
Dewey code: 823.912
RRP: £20.00
Price: £16.28
Review Death and the Author: How D.H. Lawrence Died, and Was Remembered / OUP Oxford:
Publication date: 1999-03-22
Dewey code: 809
RRP: £7.99
Price: £6.39
Review Daphne du Maurier : A Daughter's Memoir / Mainstream Publishing:Since the revelations of Margaret Forster's biography of Daphne du Maurier, it has been difficult to look at du Maurier in the light in which she wished to be seen. We now know of her depressions and self-contempt, of the extent to which her career and her obsession with being a perfect wife and mother were a way of proving to her dead father that she was worthy of him. To her children, of course, she hardly seemed driven at all, and this is an attractive memoir because it makes clear to us that what was won at so terrible a cost was at least some sort of victory. The sheer ordinariness of Flavia Lang's sense of her mother is a tribute of a kind -a happiness so successfully mimicked has its own reality. Of course there are ironies here-Mrs. Lang manages to maintain a blissful naivete about her mother's relationship with Gertrude Lawrence, whose sudden death broke her heart. And the same innocence or reticence applies to the Battle of Arnhem, and the way it destroyed her father's career; things were kept from the children, and the children have grown up, fairly charmingly, to keep them from themselves. -Roz Kaveney.
Publication date: 2008-04-17
RRP: £16.99
Price: £8.83
Review The Last Cigarette (Smoking Diaries Volume 3) / Faber and Faber:
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Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, A Gift from the Gallowgate, Fathers and Sons, Kipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling 1865-1900, Beatrix Potter: At Home in the Lake District, On Writing, Actual Air, Women Who Write, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Penguin Modern Classics), Public Dream, The Invention of Solitude, Damned to Fame: Life of Samuel Beckett, My Movie Business, Trains and Buttered Toast: Selected Radio Talks, The Autobiography of a Super Tramp (Oxford Paperbacks), Happy Birthday, Jack Nicholson (Pocket Penguins), Selected Diaries, Death and the Author: How D.H. Lawrence Died, and Was Remembered, Daphne du Maurier : A Daughter's Memoir, The Last Cigarette (Smoking Diaries Volume 3) |
