Constructive and accessible.
Palahniuk (Adjustment Day, 2018, etc.) offers a comradely handbook on writing.
After enduring a travesty of a writing workshop, the author resolved to produce a tough-love manual on fiction writing. Palahniuk’s own work had benefited immeasurably from a different workshop conducted by Tom Spanbauer, whom he credits lavishly. A journalist by training, Palahniuk is known for a minimalist, conversational writing style and transgressive fiction featuring marginalized characters, but the strategies collected here can benefit any student of writing. Ranging from the nuts-and-bolts mechanics to the community of readers, his advice is highly detailed and practical, if occasionally tinged with romantic notions that belie his literary reputation for nihilism. And it's more than merely the tricks of the trade. Not surprising for a writer whose novel Fight Club was adapted for a successful film, Palahniuk illustrates many of his points using movie references and metaphors, sometimes to excess. He reveals possibilities that are not merely off the beaten track in publishing, but which possess a portion of originality. Many writers have pioneered the use of fictional techniques in writing nonfiction, but the author often reverses the process, to powerful effect. This is also a scrapbook of his writing life, brimming with personal anecdotes instructive, amusing, or bizarre. As in his stories, Palahniuk writes for the outsider in all of us, and he wants our wellsprings of story ideas to come from as deep a pool as his own. He closes with brief recommended fiction and nonfiction reading lists and a useful guide to troubleshooting. Palahniuk is a savvy teacher, though one's acceptance of the complete body of his guidelines may hinge on the appeal of his own fiction, his minimalist bent, or his insistence that writing also might be a form of exorcism: resolving intractable personal issues through fiction. The author confides one key dictum: Do not write to be liked but to be remembered.
Constructive and accessible.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1795-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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