How to Tell a Story and Other Essays is a useful book even if it isn't the funniest thing ever - and the title essay really is chock-full of good, solid advice for budding writers. In the literary line, "In Defence of Harriet Shelley" is a lengthy demolition of Prof. Edward Dowden's 1886 attempt at a biography of English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Dowden laid all the blame for Shelley's contemptible excesses on Shelley's first wife, Harriet (a child bride aged 16). "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences" is a rich chortle made richer by the fact that its seemingly hyperbolic charges are all perfectly true. Other selections include "Traveling with a Reformer," "Private History of the 'Jumping Frog' Story," "Mental Telegraphy Again," "What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us," and "A Little Note to M. Paul Bourget." Today's readers probably know less about Paul Bourget than they know of the poet Shelley, and care not at all about 19th-century authorial cat fights.

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An irresistible collection of favorite writings from an author celebrated for his bravura style and sheer unpredictability Francis Spufford's welcome first volume of collected essays gathers an array of his compelling writings from the 1990s to the present. He makes use of a variety of encounters with particular places, writers, or books to address deeper questions relating to the complicated relationship between story-telling and truth-telling. How must a nonfiction writer imagine facts, vivifying them to bring them to life? How must a novelist create a dependable world of story, within which facts are, in fact, imaginary? And how does a religious faith felt strongly to be true, but not provably so, draw on both kinds of writerly imagination? Ranging freely across topics as diverse as the medieval legends of Cockaigne, the Christian apologetics of C. S. Lewis, and the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini, Spufford provides both fresh observations and thought-provoking insights. No less does he inspire an irresistible urge to turn the page and read on.

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Write Like Mark Twain Did! “The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.” - How to Tell a Story, Mark Twain Interested in writing fiction yourself? Looking for a place to start, a book of some sorts that can tell you all the secrets? How about starting with Mark Twain’s course on How to Tell a Story! By studying it, the unique writing style of Mark Twain will be revealed pointing out at the same time the major differences between the European literature and the American one. This Xist Classics edition has been professionally formatted for e-readers with a linked table of contents. This eBook also contains a bonus book club leadership guide and discussion questions. We hope you’ll share this book with your friends, neighbors and colleagues and can’t wait to hear what you have to say about it. Xist Publishing is a digital-first publisher. Xist Publishing creates books for the touchscreen generation and is dedicated to helping everyone develop a lifetime love of reading, no matter what form it takes

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.

The theme of this collection is the excellence of the Story, especially the kind of story dear to Lewis-fantasy and science fiction, which he fostered in an age dominated by realistic fiction. On Stories is a companion volume to Lewis’s collected shorter fiction, The Dark Tower and Other Stories. Edited and with a Preface by Walter Hooper.