As a literary agent, Noah Lukeman hears thousands of book pitches a year. Often the stories sound great in concept, but never live up to their potential on the page. Lukeman shows beginning and advanced writers how to implement the fundamentals of successful plot development, such as character building and heightened suspense and conflict. Writers will find it impossible to walk away from this invaluable guide---a veritable fiction-writing workshop---without boundless new ideas. “One of the best-ever books about the craft of writing. It is a book that can change the world of every writer who embraces Lukeman's ideas. His classroom on paper should be on every writer's shelf to be read again and again.” --Authorlink

"Fraenkel Gallery is pleased to announce The Plot Thickens, an exhibition and 250-page catalogue marking the gallery's 35th anniversary. Comprised of 100 photographs acquired and assembled over the last five years, The Plot Thickens revels in the richness of the medium through works by its greatest masters interwoven with prints by the anonymous and unknown. The majority of images are being exhibited and published for the first time"--Fraenkelgallery.com.

Friday Barnes is being attacked on all fronts! When Friday Barnes gets involved in her frenemy Ian Wainscott's family dispute, it appears her knack for uncovering the truth may ruin their friendship once and for all. Highcrest Academy is no longer a fun place to be. Ian has declared war on Friday and she is thinking of leaving . . . for good. Meanwhile, there's two new teachers to contend with - a celebrity artist whose intentions are somewhat unclear, and an over-enthusiastic PE teacher on a fitness crusade. Between them and Ian, it's going to be one dangerous term. Can Friday repair her friendship with Ian, restore her perfect school-life balance and work out who is committing the blatant acts of vandalism around Highcrest? No one said high school would be easy!

The Plot Thickens came about because Mary Higgins Clark decided to do something about illiteracy in America. She asked ten of her fellow mystery writers to donate a story for this collection. They could write anything they wished, with only one requirement: each story had to contain: A thick fog ... a thick book ... and a thick steak. In this superior anthology, contibutors Mary Higgins Clark, Lawrence Block, Edna Buchanan, Walter Mosley, Nancy Pickard, Nelson and Lauren DeMille, Donald E. Westlake, Janet Evanovich, Carol Higgins Clark and Ann Rule have created imaginative tales that chill the spine and warm the heart.

A collection of plays focusing on the world of teenagers.

In the early 1800s, books were largely unillustrated. By the 1830s and 1840s, however, innovations in wood- and steel-engraving techniques changed how Victorian readers consumed and conceptualized fiction. A new type of novel was born, often published in serial form, one that melded text and image as partners in meaning-making. These illustrated serial novels offered Victorians a reading experience that was both verbal and visual, based on complex effects of flash-forward and flashback as the placement of illustrations revealed or recalled significant story elements. Victorians’ experience of what are now canonical novels thus differed markedly from that of modern readers, who are accustomed to reading single volumes with minimal illustration. Even if modern editions do reproduce illustrations, these do not appear as originally laid out. Modern readers therefore lose a crucial aspect of how Victorians understood plot—as a story delivered in both words and images, over time, and with illustrations playing a key role. In The Plot Thickens, Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge uncover this overlooked narrative role of illustrations within Victorian serial fiction. They reveal the intricacy and richness of the form and push us to reconsider our notions of illustration, visual culture, narration, and reading practices in nineteenth-century Britain.

The Eye Club," unofficially founded around 1975, was the nickname given to the loose conglomeration of individuals who found themselves among the first new collectors of photography. Operating purely on instinct and the love of seeing, these few dozen people (including Sam Wagstaff, Andre Jammes and other now-legendary collectors) shared a distaste for established pantheons and veered instead toward the lesser-known, the anonymous, the outri or any photograph emanating sparks of electricity. Photography was their perfect vehicle and they were startled to find themselves in so much unchartered territory. The nearly 100 surprising pictures in "The Eye Club" have been assembled in a similar spirit of adventure. Photography persists as an unruly medium, and this book is comprised of an unruly group of photographs, brought together in the open-eyed spirit of the Eye Club to mark the 25th anniversary of San Francisco's esteemed Fraenkel Gallery. Printed with exceptional fidelity to the original prints, this publication assembles little-known images by some of the most important artists in the history of photography, chosen with an eye toward the unexpected and including as-yet-unpublished work by Diane Arbus, Chuck Close, Constantin Brancusi, Robert Adams, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Nan Goldin, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Andy Warhol, among many others. A significant number of works by "Photographer Unknown" are included among gems by Richard Avedon, Nadar, Andreas Gursky, Lee Friedlander, Alfred Stieglitz, Adam Fuss, Helen Levitt, Paul Outerbridge and Robert Frank. The combination is fresh and surprising.

Imagine if Sherlock Holmes was an eleven-year-old girl! When Friday Barnes, girl genius, solves a bank robbery, she uses the reward money to send herself to Highcrest Academy, the most exclusive boarding school in the country—and discovers it's a hotbed of crime! Soon she's investigating everything from disappearing homework to the terrifying Yeti haunting the school swamp. But the biggest mystery yet is Ian Wainscott, the handsomest (and most arrogant) boy in school who inexplicably hates her. Will the homework be found? Can they ever track down the Yeti? And why is Ian out to ruin her? With black-and-white art throughout, Friday Barnes, Girl Detective is the launch of an exciting new mystery series that "will keep readers laughing from start to finish." (Publishers Weekly)