There are only, in my humble opinion, two kinds of readers. Readers who love your books. and… Readers who don’t know they love your books yet. But how do you reach those readers in the second category, no matter what kind of writer you are? The answer to that question is… Universal Fantasy Universal Fantasy is why my sales tripled when I “accidentally” wrote three books that landed in the Amazon Top 100. Universal Fantasy is why some authors get gobs of gushing reviews and some authors who write “way better” get crickets. Universal Fantasy is the answer to many of the questions you might have thought were unanswerable or simply up to luck, like… • Will this sell? • Why is that selling? • Why didn’t this sell? • Will readers like what I am writing? • Why do I love the TV shows/books/entertainments I do? • Why did I buy that thing I bought when I didn’t intend to buy it? BE WARNED…once known, Universal Fantasy cannot be undiscovered. Leave this book be if you’re truly satisfied with your current writing life. But if you’re not afraid—if you’re ready to know the secret hidden inside all bestselling stories, open this gift and find out how to use UNIVERSAL FANTASY to write and market books that SELL to ANYONE.

Essays by William H. Gass.

Presents images, with a focus on figural photography, produced between 2000 and 2010 by 17 South African photographers: David Goldblatt, Santu Mofokeng, Guy Tillim, Pieter Hugo, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Berni Searle, Jodi Bieber, Terry Kurgan, Zanele Muholi, Hasan and Husain Essop, Roelof van Wyk, Graeme Williams, Kudzanai Chiurai, Sabelo Mlangeni, Jo Ractliffe, Mikhael Subotzky, and Nontsikelelo Veleko.

Can the novel survive in an age when tales of historical figures and contemporary personalities dominate the reading lists of the book-buying public? Naomi Jacobs addresses this question in a study of writers such as William Styron, E. L. Doctorow, and Robert Coover, who challenge the dominance of nonfiction by populating their fictions with real people, living and dead. Jacobs explores the genesis, varieties, and implications of this trend in a prose as lively as that of the writers she critiques. Using as a case study Robert Coover’s portrait of Richard Nixon in The Public Burning, Jacobs addresses the important legal and ethical questions raised by this trend and applies contemporary libel law to the fictionalization of living people, such as Richard Nixon. She closes her study by speculating on the future of this device and of the novel.

Previous ed.: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

"Blatt brings big data to the literary canon, exploring the wealth of fun findings that remain hidden in the works of the world's greatest writers. He assembles a database of thousands of books and hundreds of millions of words, and starts asking the questions that have intrigued curious word nerds and book lovers for generations: What are our favorite authors' favorite words? Do men and women write differently? Are bestsellers getting dumber over time? Which bestselling writer uses the most clichaes? What makes a great opening sentence? How can we judge a book by its cover? And which writerly advice is worth following or ignoring?"--Amazon.com.

Forensic Fictions is the first book-length critical study of William Faulkner's fictional depictions of the legal vocation and the practice of law. Examining Faulkner's lawyer characters in light of the southern storytelling tradition, Jay Watson argues that the forensic competence of the Faulknerian lawyer is a direct function of his skill as a raconteur. To trace the biographical and historical roots of Faulkner's lifelong preoccupation with the legal profession, Watson draws on contemporary scholarship in narrative, rhetoric, jurisprudence, legal and intellectual history, literary theory, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. His approach yields insightful readings of forensic characters and scenes from such works as "An Odor of Verbena," The Hamlet, "Wild Palms," Absalom, Absalom! and The Reivers. Watson shows the links between storytelling and the competence of Faulkner's legal characters by examining the intertextual logic that connects the two most important lawyers in the Yoknapatawpha fiction: the incompetent Horace Benbow and the more capable Gavin Stevens, whose entrance into Faulkner's oeuvre coincides with Benbow's untimely departure from it. Focusing on the nine novels in which these two characters appear, Watson traces the evolutionary process by which Stevens supplants Benbow. Three of the Stevens novels--Intruder in the Dust, Knight's Gambit, and Requiem for a Nun--from what Watson calls Faulkner's "forensic trilogy" and, when read together, constitute the writer's most sustained investigation of the rhetorical and ethical responsibilities of the lawyer-citizen. Faulkner, Watson argues, saw the forensic figure as a potential hybrid of homo loquens and homo politicus, capable of combing the roles of storyteller, rhetorician, and theatrical performer with those of critic, citizen, and ethical man. As such, this figure served as a provocative authorial surrogate through whom Faulkner could explore diverse and often contradictory aspects of his personal experience, his family background, his cultural heritage, and, most of all, his own artistic use of language.

From The Other Boleyn Girl to Fingersmith , this collection explores the popularity of female-centred historical novels in recent years. It asks how these representations are influenced by contemporary gender politics, and whether they can be seen as part of a wider feminist project to recover women's history.

This book traces the concept of idiocy as it has developed in fiction and film in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It focuses particularly on visual images of idiocy and argues that writers as diverse as Gustave Flaubert, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Joseph Conrad, John Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor and Rohinton Mistry, and filmmakers such as Jean Renoir, Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Werner Herzog and John Huston have all been attracted to idiot figures as a way of thinking through issues of language acquisition, intelligence, creativity, disability, religion and social identity. Martin Halliwell provides a lively and detailed discussion of the most significant literary and cinematic uses of idiocy, arguing that scientific conceptions of the term as a classifiable medical condition are much too narrow. With the explosion of interest in idiocy among American and European filmmakers in the 1990s and the growing interest in its often overlooked history, this book offers a timely reassessment of idiocy and its distinctive place at the intersection of science and culture.

Forty dramatic fictions each told in the persona of famous Chicagoan from Barack Obama to Oprah Winfrey.