When was the last time you wrote a letter? Or received one in the mail? These days, it’s so easy to dash off a quick e-mail or text message or make a cell- phone call while you’re on the run that you may rarely make time for letter writing. But letters are a time-honored form of connection that simply cannot be equaled or replaced by faster methods of communication. The Art of the Personal Letter reclaims this lost art, giving you the gift of leisurely expression and allowing you to write beautiful, enduring letters to the people you care about—be it by hand or on a computer. For any occasion—whether you’re reaching out to connect with a long-lost friend or you want to express condolences with grace—author Margaret Shepherd gives you both the inspiration and the tools to write a memorable and meaningful letter that will be cherished by its recipient for years. Filled with marvelous examples of common types of letters, The Art of the Personal Letter provides helpful guidelines to enhance your unique voice and inspire you to start that holiday letter or difficult letter of apology. From choosing just the right words, the right stationery, and even the right pen or font, you’ll learn everything you need to know about the timeless art of the personal letter.

When was the last time you wrote a letter? Or received one in the mail? These days, it’s so easy to dash off a quick e-mail or text message or make a cell- phone call while you’re on the run that you may rarely make time for letter writing. But letters are a time-honored form of connection that simply cannot be equaled or replaced by faster methods of communication. The Art of the Personal Letter reclaims this lost art, giving you the gift of leisurely expression and allowing you to write beautiful, enduring letters to the people you care about—be it by hand or on a computer. For any occasion—whether you’re reaching out to connect with a long-lost friend or you want to express condolences with grace—author Margaret Shepherd gives you both the inspiration and the tools to write a memorable and meaningful letter that will be cherished by its recipient for years. Filled with marvelous examples of common types of letters, The Art of the Personal Letter provides helpful guidelines to enhance your unique voice and inspire you to start that holiday letter or difficult letter of apology. From choosing just the right words, the right stationery, and even the right pen or font, you’ll learn everything you need to know about the timeless art of the personal letter.

From overcoming illegible penmanship to mastering the challenge of keeping straight margins, avoiding smeared ink, and choosing stationery that is appropriate but suits your style, this is a powerful little guide to conveying thoughts in an enduring—and noteworthy—way. For those who enjoy writing notes, or those who value doing so but find themselves intimidated by the task, acclaimed calligrapher Margaret Shepherd has created both an epistolary tribute and rescue manual. Just as you cherish receiving personal mail, you can take pleasure in crafting correspondence. Love, gratitude, condolences, congratulations—for every emotion and occasion, a snippet of heartfelt prose is included, sure to loosen the most stymied letter writer.

Deborah Parker examines Michelangelo's use of language in his correspondence as a means of understanding the creative process of this extraordinary artist.

Despite the ever-growing influence of technology, handwritten letters are regaining their value, meaning and popularity.

For more than four hundred years, the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of all literary forms. Distinguished from the detached formal essay by its friendly, conversational tone, its loose structure, and its drive toward candor and self-disclosure, the personal essay seizes on the minutiae of daily life-vanities, fashions, foibles, oddballs, seasonal rituals, love and disappointment, the pleasures of solitude, reading, taking a walk -- to offer insight into the human condition and the great social and political issues of the day. The Art of the Personal Essay is the first anthology to celebrate this fertile genre. By presenting more than seventy-five personal essays, including influential forerunners from ancient Greece, Rome, and the Far East, masterpieces from the dawn of the personal essay in the sixteenth century, and a wealth of the finest personal essays from the last four centuries, editor Phillip Lopate, himself an acclaimed essayist, displays the tradition of the personal essay in all its historical grandeur, depth, and diversity.

In a forgotten nook of Cambridge a little shop stands where thousands of sheets of beautiful paper and hundreds of exquisite pens wait for the next person who, with Clara Cohen's help, will express the love, despair and desire they feel to correspondents alive, estranged or dead. Clara knows better thanmost the power a letter can have to turn a person's life around, so when she discovers a cache of wartime love letters, she follows them on the start of on a profound journey of her own.

A world of difference separates a phone call from a letter, says Alexandra Stoddard. She urges the reader to make letter-writing a natural habit, evaluates different kinds of papers, and praises the traditional fountain pen as a natural extension of the hand. Illustrated.

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras. This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid intelligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of nonfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.