For the fourth week in a row, the paperback edition of our 2004 title The Little Red Writing Book by Brandon Royal was the best-selling title in the trade through the week ending August 26.
Praise was recently spotted over at Crimespace for the new Howdunit book, Police Procedure & Investigation by Lee Lofland.
The star of the show was Lee Lofland. Lee has got a new book out that is flying off the bookshelves …
Over on The Hemingway Resource Center’s message boards, member Hijo has posted a glowing review of The Rhythm Method, Razzmatazz, and Memory in the Book Talk forum. Here’s what Hijo has to say:
Buy it. I mean it. If you value words, and using them to convey anything, get this book and read it cover to cover.
It’s like either hearing your heart telling your mind what you’ve been doing right or wrong with your writing, and why, or your alter ego explaining to others why it is you do what you do and why it works at times or doesn’t.
Read it, then go back over the poetry you know and love. Then go back over the prose you know and love. Then go back over your own work and try and see why you treated it with love, or didn’t.
I swear it is like somehow hearing lessons from the muses that makes all art suddenly blend together and come into crystal clear focus—like seeing Monet as the predecessor to HDTV.
For the third week in a row, the paperback edition of our 2004 title The Little Red Writing Book by Brandon Royal was the best-selling title in the trade through the week ending August 19.
For two weeks in a row, the paperback edition of our 2004 title The Little Red Writing Book by Brandon Royal was the best-selling title in the trade through the week ending August 12.
Steve Zousmer’s book on writing your life story got a great review from The Frustrated Writer. It begins:
To read more, check out the link:
Keith Flynn is the featured writer in Unstable Euphony’s 5 Questions series. Blogger Matt Mullins asks Keith how he writes, reads, and works, as well as what he thinks about the teaching of creativity and how he feels today’s poetry stacks up against the “classics.” Here’s a sample:
Do you write the majority of your poems in one sitting?
Never. First thought, best thought is a bullshit conceit. Valery believed that a poem was never finished, but abandoned, the poet having poured all he knows into it, and seeing no other possibilities, releases it into the world. Lowell rewrote his poems until his death. All the writers I admire became professional or published or famous by the force of their will upon the words, unwilling to settle for the first thought or effort and committed to the lifelong process of continually sharpening their tools and allowing the idea of gratification to come from surrendering to the process, “the condensary,” Lorine Niedecker called it, the internal drive to make sentences so tight that “a mosquito couldn’t squeak through,” as Berryman pontificated. This is the infernal chase, to make poems where the artifice of labor disappears and the seams dissolve, where the search, not the arrival, is the whole point. All art is the elimination of the unnecessary.
In the lastest issue of “The Poopdeck”—the International Talk Like a Pirate Day newsletter—Ol’ Chumbucket himself recommends our very own Pirate Primer:
The Pirate Primer is an amazing book, a college-level seminar on how to speak the language of pirates. It has everything—everything—you’d ever want to know about the pirate lexicon. … [I]t’s a delight to dip into and sample. It’s the ultimate smorgasbord of buccaneer banter. It’s also one of the most handsomely produced pirate volumes in a long time, hardbound with lots of nice details. It’s something you’ll read through often, and it’ll look great on the bookshelf when you’re not reading it.
If you’re only going to buy one book to help you learn to talk like a pirate, well, we’ve got to say buy ours, Pirattitude! because – Hey, pirate! But if you’re going to buy two, then by all means pick up a copy of The Pirate Primer. It’s like buying a graduate course in pirate parlance.
High praise, indeed. Thanks, Ol’ Chumbucket.
Wonderful reviews are starting to appear for our new title, Police Procedure and Investigation by Lee Lofland, our most recent effort in the new Howdunit series. Mystery author Bill Cameron writes:
I’m a big fan of the original Howdunit series, but Lee has really raised the bar with this book. It’s a fabulous reference on procedure, and a wonderful new entry in the pantheon of crime writing reference.
Inspired by our nationwide heatwave, Papercuts blogger Dwight Garner points to a beautiful passage of Paul Theroux’s in The Glimmer Train Guide to Writing Fiction: Building Blocks:
I have a quite romantic notion of when I was very young. I saw the movie “Picnic” with William Holden. Whenever I think of “Picnic,” I think of hot summers, the picnics, small towns, something dramatic happening. To me, the quintessential American experience is a summer picnic. It’s hot; it’s kind of steamy. It’s very sensual to me. The way the people are dressed, what they say, darkness falling, the crickets, all of that stuff. And I suppose the film was part of it. That moment in middle America when the corn is ripe. Maybe it’s purely fantasy because I’ve never lived in the Midwest, but that is the sense I have. Sometimes you get it in Wright Morris or Willa Cather. I think of the Midwest and then, of course, for New England I think of Robert Frost. So I think a great deal of writing which is purely American literature arouses a lot of emotions in me.
To read the rest of the post and the comments that followed, click here.