Search results for ""Author John Casey""

In Beyond the First Draft John Casey offers essential and original insights into the art of writing—and rewriting—fiction. Throughout the fourteen essays there are notes on voice, point of view, structure and other crucial elements. This book is an invaluable resource for aspiring writers and a revitalising companion for seasoned ones.

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A parrot who speaks of love, a police dog who's a Buddhist, a microbe with an inferiority complex, a chameleon hoping to find himself, a scorpion with the fastest sting in the West?Viskovitz is each of these animals and many more; yet it is the human condition with all its highs and lows which is portrayed in these hilarious metamorphoses. You're an Animal Viskovitz is a whirlwind of ironic fables, a tour de force of comic inventiveness and intelligence unlike anything that you have read before.

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James Salter’s exalted place in American letters is based largely on the intense admiration of other writers, but his work resonates far beyond the realm of fellow craftsmen, addressing themes--youth, war, erotic love, marriage, life abroad, friendship--that speak to us all.Following the publication of his first novel, Salter left behind a military career of great promise to write full-time and--through decades of searching, exacting work--became one of American literature’s master stylists. Only months before he died, at the age of eighty-nine, he agreed to serve as the first Kapnick Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, where he composed and delivered the three lectures presented in this book and introduced by his friend and fellow novelist, National Book Award-winning author John Casey.Salter speaks to us here with an easy intimacy, sharing his unceasing enchantment with the books that made up his reading life, including works by Balzac, Flaubert, Babel (whose prose is ""like a handful of radium""), Dreiser, Céline, Faulkner. These talks provide an invaluable opportunity to see the way in which a great writer reads. They also offer a candid look at the writing life--the rejection letters, not one but two negative reviews in the New York Times for the same book, writing in the morning or at night and worrying about money during the long afternoons.Salter raises the question, Why does one write? For wealth? For admiration, or a sense of ""importance""? Confronting a blank sheet that always offers too many choices, practicing a vocation that often demands one write instead of live, the answer for Salter was creating a style that captured experience, in a world where anything not written down fades away.Kapnick Foundation Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Lectures

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