What does contemporary China's diverse and exciting fiction tell us about its culture, and the relationship between art and politics? The Subplot takes us on a lively journey through a literary landscape like you've never seen before: a vast migrant-worker poetry movement, homoerotic romances by rotten girls, swaggering literary popstars, millionaire e-writers churning out the longest-ever novels, underground comics, the surreal works of Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, and Nobel-laureate Mo Yan, and what is widely hailed as a golden-age of sci-fi. Chinese online fiction is now the largest publishing platform in the world. Fueled by her passionate engagement with the arts and ideas of China's people, Megan Walsh, a brilliant young critic, shows us why it's important to finally pay attention to Chinese fiction--an exuberant drama that illustrates the complex relationship between art and politics, one that is increasingly shaping the West as well. Turns out, writers write neither what their government nor foreign readers want or expect, as they work on a different wavelength to keep alive ideas and events that are censored by the propaganda machine. The Subplot vividly captures the way in which literature offers an alternative--perhaps truer--way to understanding the contradictions that make up China itself.

What do you wear when you testify against your best friend as she goes on trial for murder? As Maggie Patterson runs her hand over the clothes in her closet and muses about the prosaic details of preparing for a shockingly personal murder trial, she is catapulted into the memories that led her to this moment. Piece by piece, she assembles the fragments of her past to make sense of a violent crime, the echoes of which ripple through her recollections. Maggie and Cynthia meet as college freshmen and are seemingly destined to be best friends for life. As the years pass, however, Maggie's marriage and career lift her to success and wealth while Cynthia's jealousy and untreated mental illness cause their relationship to disintegrate. As the stories of the two women's lives unfold, Cynthia's paranoia and anger sour every relationship she has and turn even the people who have loved her most against her, ultimately bubbling over into an event that Maggie never sees coming. Not a murder mystery in the usual sense, and spanning time and space, Sainted in Error delves into the tenacity of friendship and the damage that the stigma still attached to mental illness can do.

Clair Bondi makes the painful decision to divorce the only man she ever loved--Vince Bondi, her husband of twenty-five years. But Clair never gets the chance to tell Vince she is leaving him, because he is found fatally shot in his Porsche one night when driving home from his weekly tennis game. Haunted by his death, Clair is determined to help the Philadelphia police find the killer. Vince's secret life, including an account in Turks and Caicos, forces Clair to realize that he wasn't the man she thought he was. No longer the good wife, Clair's strength and resilience take her from her darkest moment to a life unimagined--one with true love and purpose.

"A wordless graphic novel in which twelve-year-old Marisol must adapt to a new life 1960s Brooklyn after her parents send her to the United States from Cuba to keep her safe during Castro's regime."--

Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award-winning poet Sonnet L'Abbé returns with her third collection, in which a mixed-race woman decomposes her inheritance of Shakespeare by breaking open the sonnet and inventing an entirely new poetic form. DOROTHY LIVESAY POETRY PRIZE FINALIST RAYMOND SOUSTER AWARD FINALIST How can poetry grapple with how some cultures assume the place of others? How can English-speaking writers use the English language to challenge the legacy of colonial literary values? In Sonnet's Shakespeare, one young, half-dougla (mixed South Asian and Black) poet tries to use "the master's tools" on the Bard's "house," attempting to dismantle his monumental place in her pysche and in the poetic canon. In a defiant act of literary patricide and a feat of painstaking poetic labour, Sonnet L'Abbé works with the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets as a space she will inhabit, as a place of power she will occupy. Letter by letter, she sits her own language down into the white spaces of Shakespeare's poems, until she overwhelms the original text and effectively erases Shakespeare's voice by subsuming his words into hers. In each of the 154 dense new poems of Sonnet's Shakespeare sits one "aggrocultured" Shakespearean sonnet--displaced, spoken over, but never entirely silenced. L'Abbé invented the process of Sonnet's Shakespeare to find a way to sing from a body that knows both oppression and privilege. She uses the procedural techniques of Oulipian constraint and erasure poetries to harness the raw energies of her hyperconfessional, trauma-forged lyric voice. This is an artist's magnum opus and mixed-race girlboy's diary; the voice of a settler on stolen Indigenous territories, a sexual assault survivor, a lover of Sylvia Plath and Public Enemy. Touching on such themes as gender identity, pop music, nationhood, video games, and the search for interracial love, this book is a poetic achievement of undeniable scope and significance.

An enchanted island. An evil resurrected. A society determined to gain power. When a violent attack leaves their father in the hospital, Abigail and Benjamin Cole discover there's more to their family history than mental illness. But after fifteen-year-old Abi is abducted, she learns the attack wasn't random. Thrust into an exotic and beautiful world part of a multi-millennial feud, she must decide who to trust in a society built on secrets. Questioning everything she's ever known, she enlists the help of a boy connected to her in impossible ways and uncovers a dangerous secret stretching generations. Seventeen-year-old Ben desperately searches for both his sister and his mother, but his hold on reality is fading. Something dark has latched onto him. In a race against his own failing mind, where violent hallucinations and paranoia force him to believe he's next in line for the family curse, he learns he's the only one that can save his family. When darkness is coming, who do you trust? Magic. Deceit. War. Perfect for fans of Libba Bray, Cassandra Clare, and Leigh Bardugo.

Blockbuster Plots Pure and Simple presents step-by-step strategies that demystify the structure of story. Track the 7 most important elements of scene - pre-plot; cause and effect; conflict, tension, suspence; complex characters; compelling action; clarify theme; re-vision rewrites. You will be able to develop a multi-layered plotline for your story.

Hook Your Audience with Unforgettable Storytelling! What do Luke Skywalker, John McClane, and a lonely dog on Ho'okipa Beach have in common? Simply put, we care about them. Great storytelling is making readers care about your characters, the choices they make, and what happens to them. It's making your audience feel the tension and emotion of a situation right alongside your protagonist. And to tell a damn fine story, you need to understand why and how that caring happens. Using a mix of personal stories, pop fiction examples, and traditional storytelling terms, New York Times best-selling author Chuck Wendig will help you internalize the feel of powerful storytelling. In Damn Fine Story, you'll explore: • Fretytag's Pyramid for visualizing story structure--and when to break away from traditional storytelling forms • Character relationships and interactions as the basis of every strong plot—no matter the form or genre • Rising and falling tension that pulls the audience through to the climax and conclusion of the story • Developing themes as a way to craft characters with depth Whether you're writing a novel, screenplay, video game, comic, or even if you just like to tell stories to your friends and family over dinner, this funny and informative guide is chock-full of examples about the art and craft of storytelling--and how to write a damn fine story of your own.