Showing titles in Writing & Publishing

A Lie Too Big to Fail asserts the idea that a government can never investigate itself in a crime of this magnitude. Was the convicted Sirhan Sirhan a willing participant? Or was he a mind-controlled assassin? It has fallen to independent researchers like Pease to lay out the evidence in a clear and concise manner, allowing listeners to form their theories about this event. Pease places the history of this event in the context of the era and provides shocking overlaps between other high-profile murders and attempted murders of the time. 

While writers might disagree over showing versus telling or plotting versus pantsing, none would argue this: If you want to write strong fiction, you must make your readers feel. The reader's experience must be an emotional journey of its own, one as involving as your characters' struggles, discoveries, and triumphs are for you. That's where The Emotional Craft of Fiction comes in. Veteran literary agent and expert fiction instructor Donald Maass shows you how to use story to provoke a visceral and emotional experience in readers.

A complete author's toolkit: The guide that demystifies every step of the publishing process. No matter what type of book you want to write—fiction, nonfiction, humor, sci-fi, romance, cookbook, children's book—here is how to take an idea you're passionate about, develop it into a manuscript...

Brought to you by Penguin. Verbs are the underrated stars of the English language. They hold it all together. A complete sentence cannot exist without one, yet a single verb can create complete meaning. (See?) In this glittering exploration of language, grammar, and style, Sarah L. Kaufman...

A creative writer's shelf should hold at least three essential books: a dictionary, a style guide, and Writing Fiction. Janet Burroway's best-selling classic is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and for more than three decades, it has helped hundreds of thousands of students learn the craft.  

Two must-have classics together in one volume, On Writing Well and How to Write a Memoir, from acclaimed writer, editor, and scholar William Zinsser "On Writing Well is a bible for a generation of writers looking for clues to clean, compelling prose." –New York Times On Writing Well, which...

In April 1986 a series of explosions shook the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. Flames lit up the sky, and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come. While officials tried to hush up the accident, Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors - clean-up workers, residents, firefighters, resettlers, widows, orphans - crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love.

Brought to you by Penguin. We can all be more creative. John Cleese shows us how. Creativity is usually regarded as a mysterious, rare gift that only a few possess. John Cleese begs to differ, and in this short, immensely practical and often very amusing guide he shows it's a skill that anyone...

A practical and accessible guide to getting across complex information clearly, by BBC presenter and journalist Ros Atkins, creator of the viral 'Ros Atkins on...' explainer videos. Explanation - conveying meaning - is an art. And the BBC presenter and journalist Ros Atkins, creator of the viral...

Random House presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of The Ode Less Travelled, written and read by Stephen Fry. Stephen Fry believes that if you can speak and read English you can write poetry. But it is no fun if you don't know where to start or have been led to believe that...

Most people think the way to write a best seller is to have a lot of talent and even more luck. As you will learn, there is a recipe for success, and luck may be the least important ingredient in creating a best seller. No one has cracked the code better than James Scott Bell. A best-selling author himself, and the author of the number-one best seller for writers, Plot & Structure, Mr. Bell has been teaching the principles of best-selling fiction for over 20 years, principles that apply to any genre or style.

The Bookshop in Wigtown is a bookworm's idyll - with thousands of books across nearly a mile of shelves, a real log fire, and Captain, the bookshop cat. You'd think after twenty years, owner Shaun Bythell would be used to the customers by now. Don't get him wrong - there are some good ones among...

Glasses alter, enhance, and shield the way that we view the world, and the way the world sees us. At times they are the main identifiers in a face (think John Lennon), and they signify extremes from nerdy and brainy to cool and sleazy. Adam Geczy explores this most pervasive and accessible accessory and shows that it is both a conduit to and a barrier between ourselves and the world outside.

The laboratory came to be a space to study 'facts' as natural phenomena, isolated and separated from emotions and biases. Yet the laboratory is also intertwined with the messy ambiguity of the world and embodies the power and privilege of resources, expertise, and innovation. Laboratory examines the contemporary laboratory and its relation to a host of existential concerns about science, technology, and the environment.

From the personal, intimate scale of jewelry to the monumental scale of Brutalist architecture, Parnell explores the personality of concrete and how it is embedded and embodied in everyday and familiar objects. He revels in concrete's ambiguity and contradictory qualities, from its sensitivity to the tiniest imprint to its immense compressive strength in hydroelectric dams, and traces how concrete is both the ultimate unaesthetic material as well as the quintessential building block of modernity.

Marvel Explodes tells the story year-by-year, exploring this decisive period from a creative standpoint – the expanded mythology, the new titles, and the writers and artists who would join to fuel the explosion – as well as a business one: the key transitions, including new distributor, owners, and opportunities.

In 1984, Marvel's Editor-In-Chief Jim Shooter brought Marvel's heroes and villains together for an epic battle that became the template for comic book crossovers and impacted Marvel's storylines for decades, including major changes to the Spider-Man mythos and the introduction of a new villain. Within the 12-part storyline, characters who had never met before would find themselves thrown together to achieve a common goal. They formed shaky alliances. There were tremendous power struggles. Teams within teams would form.

Rhyme and Reason takes you from a medieval accountant (called Chaucer) trying to entertain his lord, past a doomed love affair in the Tower of London, through adoring sonnets and notebooks filled with dirty poems, through Byromania and the Victorian hearth, understanding why people simply enjoyed poetry. From the poems of housemaids to the rhymes of kings it's the history of Britain through the poems that people read, recited and loved.

Write Well to Sell Big! In the age of e-mail and instant communication, great sales copy is indispensable to closing a deal. But too many sales letters end up in the junk file or the wastebasket. In this new edition of his top-selling book, author Dan Kennedy explains why some sales letters work...

In July 1995, San Jose Mercury-News reporter Gary Webb found the Big One - the blockbuster story every journalist secretly dreams about - without even looking for it. A simple phone call concerning an unexceptional pending drug trial turned into a massive conspiracy involving the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, L.A. and Bay Area crack cocaine dealers, and the Central Intelligence Agency.