A Family Sketch And Other Private Writings

This book publishes, for the first time in full, the two most revealing of Mark Twain’s private writings. Here he turns his mind to the daily life he shared with his wife Livy, their three daughters, a great many servants, and an imposing array of pets. These first-hand accounts display this gifted and loving family in the period of its flourishing. Mark Twain began to write "A Family Sketch" in response to the early death of his eldest daughter, Susy, but the manuscript grew under his hands to become an exuberant account of the entire household. His record of the childrens’ sayings—"Small Foolishnesses"—is next, followed by the related manuscript "At the Farm." Also included are selections from Livy’s 1885 diary and an authoritative edition of Susy’s biography of her father, written when she was a teenager. Newly edited from the original manuscripts, this anthology is a unique record of a fascinating family.

Winner of the John S. Tuckey 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award for Mark Twain Scholarship from The Center for Mark Twain Studies American novelist E.L. Doctorow once observed that literature “endows places with meaning.” Yet, as this wide-ranging new book vividly illustrates, understanding the places that shaped American writers’ lives and their art can provide deep insight into what makes their literature truly meaningful. Published on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Historic Preservation Act, Writing America is a unique, passionate, and eclectic series of meditations on literature and history, covering over 150 important National Register historic sites, all pivotal to the stories that make up America, from chapels to battlefields; from plantations to immigration stations; and from theaters to internment camps. The book considers not only the traditional sites for literary tourism, such as Mark Twain’s sumptuous Connecticut home and the peaceful woods surrounding Walden Pond, but also locations that highlight the diversity of American literature, from the New York tenements that spawned Abraham Cahan’s fiction to the Texas pump house that irrigated the fields in which the farm workers central to Gloria Anzaldúa’s poetry picked produce. Rather than just providing a cursory overview of these authors’ achievements, acclaimed literary scholar and cultural historian Shelley Fisher Fishkin offers a deep and personal reflection on how key sites bore witness to the struggles of American writers and inspired their dreams. She probes the global impact of American writers’ innovative art and also examines the distinctive contributions to American culture by American writers who wrote in languages other than English, including Yiddish, Chinese, and Spanish. Only a scholar with as wide-ranging interests as Shelley Fisher Fishkin would dare to bring together in one book writers as diverse as Gloria Anzaldúa, Nicholas Black Elk, David Bradley, Abraham Cahan, S. Alice Callahan, Raymond Chandler, Frank Chin, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Countee Cullen, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jessie Fauset, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Allen Ginsberg, Jovita González, Rolando Hinojosa, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Lawson Fusao Inada, James Weldon Johnson, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Irena Klepfisz, Nella Larsen, Emma Lazarus, Sinclair Lewis, Genny Lim, Claude McKay, Herman Melville, N. Scott Momaday, William Northup, John Okada, Miné Okubo, Simon Ortiz, Américo Paredes, John P. Parker, Ann Petry, Tomás Rivera, Wendy Rose, Morris Rosenfeld, John Steinbeck, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Yoshiko Uchida, Tino Villanueva, Nathanael West, Walt Whitman, Richard Wright, Hisaye Yamamoto, Anzia Yezierska, and Zitkala-Ša. Leading readers on an enticing journey across the borders of physical places and imaginative terrains, the book includes over 60 images, and extended excerpts from a variety of literary works. Each chapter ends with resources for further exploration. Writing America reveals the alchemy though which American writers have transformed the world around them into art, changing their world and ours in the process.

indigo is the joy and lament of a human being theologian father fashioning new ideas about the divine within the painful loss of his daughter within the constraints of his own intelligence within the constraints of what religion had been telling him his whole life some of which was good and some of which wasn’t good it’s a way forward where forward means the interaction of past choices past events and personal agency in this moment and this moment and … yes, this moment it’s the hope on the underside of grief like the pilot fish with the shark around the whale within a section of ocean an ecosystem of depth and light and slow-motion shadows oceanographic poetry that breaks the surface from time to time that breaks one’s heart from time to time indigo is the color of grief for its gradation of sapphires and violets descending into violence or ascending into lightness the beauty of which is found in both extremes entanglement the divine infused within the whole the hole infused within the divine read it for cursing for weeping for laughing read it for mourning read it for the world is on fire

In the 1920s and 1930s Noël Coward mastered and defined the art of the revue sketch - short and often topical or satirical stage pieces, many of which were a lead-in to his famous songs. He wrote these sketches for the top revues of the 1920s and 1930s, including London Calling! (1923) and Cochrane's Revue of 1931. This volume collects Coward's best and most witty pieces, including Rain Before Seven, the only sketch he performed with Gertrude Lawrence, and the hilarious parody, Some Other Private Lives, in which Coward burlesques his own famous play, Private Lives. Also included are short one-act plays never before published. The collection includes an Introduction by Coward scholar Barry Day, setting the work in the context of its time and its dramatic form. A forgotten area of Coward's writing is now back in print.

Vols. for 1871-76, 1913-14 include an extra number, The Christmas bookseller, separately paged and not included in the consecutive numbering of the regular series.

This revised and updated edition of The Creative Writing Handbook now includes new chapters on writing for stage and radio and on writing screenplays for film and television. Written by professional writers and tutors, it covers all aspects of the writing process, from drafting first thoughts to shaping them into polished and publishable work. In a series of lively and stimulating chapters, all major areas of writing are explored, from screen-writing to short fiction, from autobiography to experimental prose. The Handbook offers new and experienced writers a whole range of creative ideas, sound advice and open-ended tasks for exploring experience, mastering technique and thereby releasing the full potential of the imagination. As most taught courses in creative writing are in workshop form, each chapter includes invaluable ideas on how to run group sessions and offer a rich fund of suggestions for developing writing beyond the workshop.

Designed to reform contemporary British society, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Tatler (1709-1711) and The Spectator (1711-1712, 1714) rely heavily on the representation of contemporary manners. In shaping such behavioural images, the authors made use of the satirical character sketch. Their character sketches (re)create social interactions between fictionalised representatives of moral types of men and women located in contemporary London. This study examines how Addison and Steele employed the character sketch to create a ‘cosmography’ of (wo)man by actively engaging with the observational approaches of contemporary naturalists. Addison and Steele adapted distinctly empirical methods (e.g. induction and deduction, note taking, repeated and collective observation) and appropriated the (medico-legal) case study to communicate and disseminate socio-moral knowledge. At the same time, the character sketch served them as a means to establish a taxonomic order of the socio-moral knowledge conveyed in the texts. The study sheds new light on the literary techniques and the methodological frameworks of two journals essentially associated with the British - and the European - Enlightenment.