Where Books and Readers Come Together
The Naked and the Dead is concerned with the invasion and taking of the Japanese-controlled island of Anopopei. Most of the 721-page book follows a platoon as they prepare to land on the island until the successful American victory, with some inserts from ”The Time Machine” to give back story to the platoon of foot soldiers the nameless, omniscient narrator follows through the campaign in third person POV.
“The artist lives thus in two worlds — as do we all; but he, in so far as he knows what he is doing, in a special state of consciousness of this micromacrocosmic crucifixion that is life on earth and is perhaps, also, the fire of the sun, stars, and galaxies beyond.”
”The name Beowulf itself, ‘bee-wolf,’ apparently meaning bear, suggests affinities with a widely known folktale figure of prodigious strength, the Bear’s Son, the distribution of whose appearances, in North America as well as Eurasia, points to a background in that primordial cult of reverence for the bear discussed in Primitive Mythology, and which is still observed among the Ainus of Japan.”
The book should be called ‘How to Build Your Author Platform’ and then the last 1/3 is actually more details on how to write a proposal for a nonfiction book with much of that being four lengthy proposal samples, which are helpful but reflect more the success of the platform rather than any actual design in the proposal itself–but we can get into that in a minute.
For a National Book Award winner and a finalist for the 2008’s Pulitzer Prize, I expected much much more from Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke.
Like all writers from the moment they put pen to paper, Anderson desired to be a great writer; however, much of his life was spent as a middle-class businessman in Ohio and Virginia, later becoming the owner of Marion Publishing Company and the owner and editor of two newspapers.
In one of his latest novels, Our Kind of Traitor, Le Carré provides a tale of espionage that makes one cheer and hope for the villain to win, or at least survive. Perry and his girlfriend, Gail, befriend Dima, a Russian money-launderer, in Antigua while on vacation.
In “Rivers of Death” Carson continues the onslaught of scientific facts which illustrate how pesticides and insecticides not only destroy the land but how they also contaminate water supplies, indirectly poisoning human beings.
Writers write to feed that demon-babe who cries out from the misery the world has inflicted upon it. Hemingway and Orwell wanted to use their gifts to help change the world for the better. And the world, I believe, is glad they did.
Even though E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel was first written and used for lectures inside the classroom at Trinity College, Cambridge, I cannot help but to imagine sitting in a stuffy classroom, loosening my collar, briefly staring out the window onto a sunny spring day in 1927 only to be drawn back to a powerful sermon concerning the craft of writing, given by a professional who knew what he was talking about.
In The Art of Fiction’s preface, Gardner writes: “About all that is required is that the would-be writer understand clearly what it is that he wants to become and what he must do to become it.”
Master Class in Fiction Writing (2006) by Adam Sexton is a useful tool and guide along the way of crafting memorable fiction.
”The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.”
In most of Cormac McCarthy’s books there is usually a male character on some sort of quest.
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) by Joseph Campbell is the book that awakened in writers and storytellers in publishing and in screenwriting to the larger scope of mythology as metaphor and to the underlining structure of stories.
