A clever compendium of newly minted words for everyday use, based on the popular column in The Atlantic.How many times have you searched for a word that means just what you want to express, yet failed to find anything suitable? Most of us, it turns out, lead lives rife with experiences, people, and things that have no names. Word Fugitives comes to the rescue, supplying hundreds of inspired words coined or redefined to meet these everyday needs.

A special 10th anniversary edition of Roy Peter Clark's bestselling guide to writing, featuring five bonus tools.Ten years ago, Roy Peter Clark, America's most influential writing teacher, whittled down almost thirty years of experience in journalism, writing, and teaching into a series of fifty short essays on different aspects of writing. In the past decade, Writing Tools has become a classic guidebook for novices and experts alike and remains one of the...

“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.”With wit and irreverence, lexicographer Kory Stamper cracks open the obsessive world of dictionary writing, from the agonizing decisions about what to define and how to do it to the knotty q...

America's most influential writing teacher offers an engaging and practical guide to effective short-form writing." How to Write Short is a deeply practical guidebook and an annotated collection of concise gems from some of the world's greatest writers and journalists, not one of them longer than 300 words. Roy's message is clear: great writing is a matter of craft, not word count. How to Wri...

For more than a quarter of a century, Pat Schneider has helped writers find and liberate their true voices. She has taught all kinds--the award winning, the struggling, and those who have been silenced by poverty and hardship. Her innovative methods have worked in classrooms from elementary to graduate level, in jail cells and public housing projects, in convents and seminaries, in youth at-risk programs, and with groups of the terminally ill. Now, in Writing Alone and with Others, Schneid...

The long-awaited guide to writing long-form nonfiction by the legendary author and teacherDraft No. 4 is a master class on the writer’s craft. In a series of playful, expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he has gathered over his career and has refined while teaching at Princeton University, where he has nurtured some of the most esteemed writers of recent decades. McPhee offers definitive guidance in the decisions regarding arrangement, dic...

Do you cringe when a talking head pronounces “niche” as NITCH? Do you get bent out of shape when your teenager begins a sentence with “and”? Do you think British spellings are more “civilised” than the American versions? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you’re myth-informed.In Origins of the Specious, word mavens Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman reveal why some of grammar’s best-known “rules” aren’t—and never were—rules at all. This playfull...

How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays, and Life into LiteratureFrom drawing a map of a remembered neighborhood to signing a form releasing yourself to take risks in your work, Roorbach offers innovative techniques that will trigger ideas for all writers.Writing Life Stories is a classic text that appears on countless creative nonfiction and composition syllabi the world over. This updated 10th anniversary edition gives you the same f...

Twenty of America's bestselling authors share tricks, tips, and secrets of the successful writing life.Anyone who's ever sat down to write a novel or even a story knows how exhilarating and heartbreaking writing can be. So what makes writers stick with it? In Why We Write, twenty well-known authors candidly share what keeps them going and what they love most—and least—about their vocation.Contributing authors include:Isabel ...

Deceptively simple and surprisingly addictive, Not Quite What I Was Planning is a thousand glimpses of humanity—six words at a time.One Life. Six Words. What's Yours?When Hemingway famously wrote, "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn," he proved that an entire story can be told using a half dozen words. When the online storytelling magazine SMITH asked readers to submit six-word memoirs, they proved a whole, real life can be told this way too. The results are fascinating, hila...

New in the Short History of Asia series edited by Milton Osborne this is a concise and readable history of Cambodia from its rich and powerful past through the era of French protection the Vietnamese conflict the Pol Pot regime and to its present day incarnation as a constitutional monarchy and popular tourist destination. Temples and killing fields mighty rivers and impenetrable forests a past filled with glory and decline Cambodia is a land of contrasts. A millennia ago it was an empire ...

Great narratives are built piece by piece, through myriad small tasks and careful moves. In this landmark book, Robert Olmstead shows how distinguished writers past and present have built their fiction and nonfiction. Through this writer's-eye analysis of more than 150 of literature's most finely crafted passages, you'll learn to read like a writer. Then, more than 500 innovative exercises challenge you to experiment with - and expand upon - the techniques of the masters, so you can use th...