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Style & Grammar

ACADEMIC ENGLISH: SKILLS FOR SUCCESS

ACADEMIC ENGLISH: SKILLS FOR SUCCESS

By: Tsang, Wai Lan
$25.00
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"Academic English" focuses on enhancing undergraduate students' English language proficiency in the university context. It is intended for students who are in their first year at university. It aims to help students bridge the gap between secondary school study and study at an English-medium university. Students are introduced to the skills needed to understand and produce common undergraduate academic texts such as reports, essays and tutorial discussions. This will help them to participate more effectively in their first-year university studies in English, thereby enriching their first-year experience.

ART OF MEMOIR

ART OF MEMOIR

By: Karr, Mary
$15.99
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Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well.

For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse. (The writing program there produced such acclaimed authors as Cheryl Strayed, Keith Gessen, and Koren Zailckas.) In The Art of Memoir, she synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and "black belt sinner," providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre.

Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers' experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr's own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told-- and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.) As she breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, she breaks open our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminates the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate.

Joining such classics as Stephen King's On Writing and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, The Art of Memoir is an elegant and accessible exploration of one of today's most popular literary forms--a tour de force from an accomplished master pulling back the curtain on her craft.

ART OF STYLING SENTENCES

ART OF STYLING SENTENCES

By: Sullivan, K D
$9.99
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A must-have for any student or aspiring writer, this book reviews the fundamentals of good sentence structure: Conventions of writing style change in subtle ways with passing years--a fact that prompts the need for periodic revisions of books like this one. The authors review the fundamentals of good sentence structure and then go on to describe twenty basic sentence patterns that encompass virtually every effective way of writing sentences in English. They also draw on passages by current prominent writers, using these examples to show how varying rhythm and sentence patterns can result in elegant writing styles that keep their readers interested. Exercises with answers and explanations appear throughout the text. Overflowing with practical and useful advice, this little gem will change the way people write.
ASSOCIATED PRESS STYLEBOOK 2013

ASSOCIATED PRESS STYLEBOOK 2013

By: The Associated Press
$19.99
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The style of the Associated Press is the gold standard for news writing. With "The AP Stylebook" in hand, you can learn how to write and edit with the clarity and professionalism for which they are famous. Fully revised and updated, this new edition contains more than 3,000 A to Z entries including more than 200 new ones detailing the AP s rules on grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, abbreviation, and word and numeral usage. You ll find answers to such wide-ranging questions as: . When should the names of government bodies be spelled out and when should they be abbreviated?. What are the general definitions of the major religious movements?. Which companies do the big media conglomerates own?. Who are all the members of the British Commonwealth?. How should box scores for baseball games be filed?. What constitutes fair use ?. What exactly does the Freedom of Information Act cover?With invaluable additional sections on the unique guidelines for business and sports reporting and on how you can guard against libel and copyright infringement, "The AP Stylebook" is the one reference that all writers, editors, and students cannot afford to be without."

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ATTACK OF THE COPULA SPIDERS AND OTHER ESSAYS ON WRITING

By: Glover, Douglas
$17.95
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A GLOBE & MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR 2012

"Glover is a master of narrative structure."
--Wall Street Journal

In the tradition of E.M. Forster, John Gardner, and James Wood, Douglas Glover has produced a book on writing at once erudite, anecdotal, instructive, and amusing. Attack of the Copula Spiders represents the accumulated wisdom of a remarkable literary career: novelist, short story writer, essayist, teacher and mentor, Glover has for decades been asking the vital questions. How does the way we read influence the way we write? What do craft books fail to teach aspiring writers about theme, about plot and subplot, about constructing point of view? How can we maintain drama on the level of the sentence--and explain drama in the sentences of others? What is the relationship of form and art? How do you make words live?
Whether his subject is Alice Munro, Cervantes, or the creative writing classroom, Glover's take is frank and fresh, demonstrating again and again that graceful writers must first be strong readers. This collection is a call-to-arms for all lovers of English, and Attack of the Copula Spiders our best defense against the assaults of a post-literate age.

Douglas Glover is the award-winning author of five story collections, four novels, and two works of non-fiction. He is currently on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing program.

Praise for Douglas Glover

"A master of narrative structure." - Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life, Wall Street Journal

"So sharp, so evocative, that the reader sees well beyond the tissue of words into ... the author's poetic grace." - The New Yorker

"Glover invents his own assembly of critical approaches and theories that is eclectic, personal, scholarly, and smart ... a direction for future literary criticism to take." - The Denver Quarterly

"A ribald, raunchy wit with a talent for searing self-investigation." - The Globe and Mail

"Knotty, intelligent, often raucously funny." - Maclean's

"Passionately intricate." - The Chicago Tribune

"Darkly humorous, simultaneously restless and relentless." - Kirkus Reviews

BEHIND THE BOOK: ELEVEN AUTHORS ON THEIR PATH TO PUBLICATION

BEHIND THE BOOK: ELEVEN AUTHORS ON THEIR PATH TO PUBLICATION

By: Jones, Chris MacKenzie
$20.00
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Every book has a story of its own, a path leading from the initial idea that sparked it to its emergence into the world in published form. No two books follow quite the same path, but all are shaped by a similar array of market forces and writing craft concerns as well as by a cast of characters stretching beyond the author.
Behind the Book explores how eleven contemporary first-time authors, in genres ranging from post-apocalyptic fiction to young adult fantasy to travel memoir, navigated these pathways with their debut works. Based on extensive interviews with the authors, it covers the process of writing and publishing a book from beginning to end, including idea generation, developing a process, building a support network, revising the manuscript, finding the right approach to publication, building awareness, and ultimately moving on to the next project. It also includes insights from editors, agents, publishers, and others who helped to bring these projects to life.
Unlike other books on writing craft, Behind the Book looks at the larger picture of how an author's work and choices can affect the outcome of a project. The authors profiled in each story open up about their challenges, mistakes, and successes. While their paths to publication may be unique, together they offer important lessons that authors of all types can apply to their own writing journeys.
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BETWEEN YOU & ME: CONFESSIONS OF A COMMA QUEEN

By: Norris, Mary
$15.95
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Mary Norris has spent more than three decades working in The New Yorker's renowned copy department, helping to maintain its celebrated high standards. In Between You & Me, she brings her vast experience with grammar and usage, her good cheer and irreverence, and her finely sharpened pencils to help the rest of us in a boisterous language book as full of life as it is of practical advice.

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Amazon, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Library Journal.

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BETWIXT-AND-BETWEEN: ESSAYS ON THE WRITING LIFE

By: Boully, Jenny
$16.95
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"Jenny is the future of nonfiction in America. What an absurdly arrogant statement to make. I make it anyway. Watch." --John D'Agata

"Yes, Aristotle, there can be pleasure without 'complete and unified action with a beginning, middle, and end.' Jenny Boully has done it." --Mary Jo Bang

"Jenny Boully is a deeply weird writer--in the best way." --Ander Monson

Jenny Boully's essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterizes falling in love as well as the life of a writer. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy, making the practice of writing a metaphor for the illusory nature of experience. Betwixt and Between is, in many ways, simply a book about how to live.

Jenny Boully is the author of The Body: An Essay, The Book of Beginnings and Endings: Essays, not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them, and other books. Born in Thailand, she grew up in Texas and holds a PhD in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She teaches creative writing and literature at Columbia College Chicago.

BEYOND THE FIRST DRAFT: THE ART OF FICTION

BEYOND THE FIRST DRAFT: THE ART OF FICTION

By: Casey, John
$16.95
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Through anecdotes about other writers' methods and habits (as well as his own) and close readings of literature from Aristotle to Zola, the essays in this collection offer "suggestions about things to do, things to think about when your writing has got you lost in the woods." In "Dogma and Anti-dogma" Casey sets out the tried-and-true advice and then comments on when to apply it and when to ignore it. In "What's Funny" he considers the range of comedy from pratfalls to elegant wit. In "In Other Words" he discusses translations and the surprising effects that translating can have on one's native language. In "Mentors" he pays tribute to those who have guided him and other writers. Throughout the fourteen essays there are notes on voice, point of view, structure, and other crucial elements. This book is an invaluable resource for aspiring writers and a revitalizing companion for seasoned ones.

BIRD BY BIRD: SOME INSTRUCTIONS ON WRITING AND LIFE

BIRD BY BIRD: SOME INSTRUCTIONS ON WRITING AND LIFE

By: Lamott, Anne
$16.00
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"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'"

"Superb writing advice... hilarious, helpful and provocative." -- "New York Times Book Review."

"A warm, generous and hilarious guide through the writer's world and its treacherous swamps." -- "Los Angeles Times."

"A gift to all of us mortals who write or ever wanted to write... sidesplittingly funny, patiently wise and alternately cranky and kind -- a reveille to get off our duffs and start writing "now," while we still can." -- "Seattle Times."

BOOK THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

BOOK THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

$12.95
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Every reader can name at least one book that changed his or her life--and many more beloved titles will surely come to mind as well. In The Book That Changed My Life, fifteen of America's most influential authors discuss their own special literary choices. These unique interviews with National Book Award winners and finalists offer new insights into the many ways in which the experience of reading shapes the act of writing. Robert Stone on Joseph Conrad's Victory, Cynthia Ozick on Henry James's Washington Square, Charles Johnson on Jack London's The Sea-Wolf--each approaches the question of literary influence, while offering rich and wonderful revelations about his or her own writing career. James Carroll, Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow, Diane Johnson, Philip Levine, David Levering Lewis, Barry Lopez, David McCullough, Alice McDermott, Grace Paley, Linda Pastan, and Katherine Paterson are the other distinguished contributors to this collection of informed, insightful interviews.
BRYSONS DICTIONARY FOR WRITERS & EDITORS

BRYSONS DICTIONARY FOR WRITERS & EDITORS

By: Bryson, Bill
$22.00
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From one of America's most beloved and bestselling authors, a wonderfully useful and readable guide to the problems of the English language most commonly encountered by editors and writers.
What is the difference between "immanent" and "imminent"? What is the singular form of graffiti? What is the difference between "acute" and "chronic"? What is the former name of "Moldova"? What is the difference between a cardinal number and an ordinal number? One of the English language's most skilled writers answers these and many other questions and guides us all toward precise, mistake-free usage. Covering spelling, capitalization, plurals, hyphens, abbreviations, and foreign names and phrases, "Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors" will be an indispensable companion for all who care enough about our language not to maul, misuse, or contort it.
This dictionary is an essential guide to the wonderfully disordered thing that is the English language. As Bill Bryson notes, it will provide you with "the answers to all those points of written usage that you kind of know or ought to know but can't quite remember."

BUSINESS OF BEING A WRITER

BUSINESS OF BEING A WRITER

By: Friedman, Jane
$25.00
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Writers talk about their work in many ways: as an art, as a calling, as a lifestyle. Too often missing from these conversations is the fact that writing is also a business. The reality is, those who want to make a full- or part-time job out of writing are going to have a more positive and productive career if they understand the basic business principles underlying the industry.

The Business of Being a Writer offers the business education writers need but so rarely receive. It is meant for early-career writers looking to develop a realistic set of expectations about making money from their work or for working writers who want a better understanding of the industry. Writers will gain a comprehensive picture of how the publishing world works--from queries and agents to blogging and advertising--and will learn how they can best position themselves for success over the long term.

Jane Friedman has more than twenty years of experience in the publishing industry, with an emphasis on digital media strategy for authors and publishers. She is encouraging without sugarcoating, blending years of research with practical advice that will help writers market themselves and maximize their writing-related income. It will leave them empowered, confident, and ready to turn their craft into a career.

CAUGHT IN THE WEB OF WORDS: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary

CAUGHT IN THE WEB OF WORDS: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary

By: Murray, K M Elisabeth
$15.95
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This unique and celebrated biography describes how a largely self-educated boy from a small village in Scotland entered the world of scholarship and became the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and a lexicographer greater by far than Dr. Johnson. It also provides an absorbing account of how the dictionary was written, the personalities of the people working on it, and the endless difficulties which nearly led to the whole enterprise being abandoned.
CHICAGO GUIDE TO GRAMMAR, USAGE, AND PUNCTUATION

CHICAGO GUIDE TO GRAMMAR, USAGE, AND PUNCTUATION

By: Garner, Bryan A
$45.00
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Few people can write on the English language with the authority of Bryan A. Garner. The author of The Chicago Manual of Style's popular "Grammar and Usage" chapter, Garner explains the vagaries of English with absolute precision and utmost clarity. With The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation, he has written the definitive guide for writers who want their prose to be both memorable and correct.

Throughout the book Garner describes standard literary English--the forms that mark writers and speakers as educated users of the language. He also offers historical context for understanding the development of these forms. The section on grammar explains how the canonical parts of speech came to be identified, while the section on syntax covers the nuances of sentence patterns as well as both traditional sentence diagramming and transformational grammar. The usage section provides an unprecedented trove of empirical evidence in the form of Google Ngrams, diagrams that illustrate the changing prevalence of specific terms over decades and even centuries of English literature. Garner also treats punctuation and word formation, and concludes the book with an exhaustive glossary of grammatical terms and a bibliography of suggested further reading and references.

The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation is a magisterial work, the culmination of Garner's lifelong study of the English language. The result is a landmark resource that will offer clear guidelines to students, writers, and editors alike.

COLUMBIA GUIDE ONLINE STYLE 2ND

COLUMBIA GUIDE ONLINE STYLE 2ND

By: Taylor, Todd
$19.50
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The Columbia Guide to Online Style is the standard resource for citing electronic and electronically accessed sources. It is also a critical style guide for creating documents electronically for submission for print or electronic publication.

Updated and expanded, this guide now explains how to cite technologies such as Web logs and pod casts; provides more guidance on translating the elements of Columbia Online Style (COS) citations for use with existing print-based formats (such as MLA, APA, and Chicago); and features additional guidelines for producing online and print documents based on new standards of markup language and publication technologies.

This edition also includes new bibliographic styles for humanities and scientific projects; examples of footnotes and endnotes for Chicago-style papers; greater detail regarding in-text and parenthetic reference and footnote styles; an added chapter on how to locate and evaluate sources for research in the electronic age; and new examples for citing full-text or full-image articles from online library databases, along with information on how to credit the source of graphics and multimedia files.

Staying ahead of rapidly evolving technologies, The Columbia Guide to Online Style continues to be a vital tool for online researchers.

DIGITAL PAPER: A MANUAL FOR RESEARCH AND WRITING WITH LIBRARY AND INTERNET MATERIALS

DIGITAL PAPER: A MANUAL FOR RESEARCH AND WRITING WITH LIBRARY AND INTERNET MATERIALS

By: Abbott, Andrew
$20.00
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Today's researchers have access to more information than ever before. Yet the new material is both overwhelming in quantity and variable in quality. How can scholars survive these twin problems and produce groundbreaking research using the physical and electronic resources available in the modern university research library? In Digital Paper, Andrew Abbott provides some much-needed answers to that question.

Abbott tells what every senior researcher knows: that research is not a mechanical, linear process, but a thoughtful and adventurous journey through a nonlinear world. He breaks library research down into seven basic and simultaneous tasks: design, search, scanning/browsing, reading, analyzing, filing, and writing. He moves the reader through the phases of research, from confusion to organization, from vague idea to polished result. He teaches how to evaluate data and prior research; how to follow a trail to elusive treasures; how to organize a project; when to start over; when to ask for help. He shows how an understanding of scholarly values, a commitment to hard work, and the flexibility to change direction combine to enable the researcher to turn a daunting mass of found material into an effective paper or thesis.

More than a mere how-to manual, Abbott's guidebook helps teach good habits for acquiring knowledge, the foundation of knowledge worth knowing. Those looking for ten easy steps to a perfect paper may want to look elsewhere. But serious scholars, who want their work to stand the test of time, will appreciate Abbott's unique, forthright approach and relish every page of Digital Paper.

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DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR? WHY WRITING WELL MATTERS

By: Evans, Harold
$27.00
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A wise and entertaining guide to writing English the proper way by one of the greatest newspaper editors of our time.

Harry Evans has edited everything from the urgent files of battlefield reporters to the complex thought processes of Henry Kissinger. He's even been knighted for his services to journalism. In Do I Make Myself Clear?, he brings his indispensable insight to us all in his definite guide to writing well.

The right words are oxygen to our ideas, but the digital era, with all of its TTYL, LMK, and WTF, has been cutting off that oxygen flow. The compulsion to be precise has vanished from our culture, and in writing of every kind we see a trend towards more -- more speed and more information but far less clarity.

Evans provides practical examples of how editing and rewriting can make for better communication, even in the digital age. Do I Make Myself Clear? is an essential text, and one that will provide every writer an editor at his shoulder.

DOING ORAL HISTORY

DOING ORAL HISTORY

By: Ritchie, Donald A
$19.95
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Oral history is vital to our understanding of the cultures and experiences of the past. Unlike written history, oral history forever captures people's feelings, expressions, and nuances of language. But what exactly is oral history? How reliable is the information gathered by oral history? And
what does it take to become an oral historian? Donald A. Ritchie, a leading expert in the field, answers these questions and in particular, explains the principles and guidelines created by the Oral History Association to ensure the professional standards of oral historians.

Doing Oral History has become one of the premier resources in oral history. It explores all aspects of the field, from starting an oral history project, including funding, staffing, and equipment to conducting interviews; publishing; videotaping; preserving materials; teaching oral history; and
using oral history in museums and on the radio. In this second edition, the author has incorporated new trends and scholarship, updated and expanded the bibliography and appendices, and added a new focus on digital technology and the Internet. Appendices include sample legal release forms and
information on oral history organizations.

Doing Oral History is a definitive step-by-step guide that provides advice and explanations on how to create recordings that illuminate human experience for generations to come. Illustrated with examples from a wide range of fascinating projects, this authoritative guide offers clear, practical, and
detailed advice for students, teachers, researchers, and amateur genealogists who wish to record the history of their own families and communities.

DRAMATIC WRITER'S COMPANION

DRAMATIC WRITER'S COMPANION

By: Dunne, Will
$19.00
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Moss Hart once said that you never really learn how to write a play; you only learn how to write this play. Crafted with that adage in mind, The Dramatic Writer's Companion is designed to help writers explore their own ideas in order to develop the script in front of them. No ordinary guide to plotting, this handbook starts with the principle that character is key. "The character is not something added to the scene or to the story," writes author Will Dunne. "Rather, the character is the scene. The character is the story."

Having spent decades working with dramatists to refine and expand their existing plays and screenplays, Dunne effortlessly blends condensed dramatic theory with specific action steps-over sixty workshop-tested exercises that can be adapted to virtually any individual writing process and dramatic script. Dunne's in-depth method is both instinctual and intellectual, allowing writers to discover new actions for their characters and new directions for their stories.

Dunne's own experience is a crucial element of this guide. His plays have been selected by the Eugene O'Neill Theatre Center for three U.S. National Playwrights Conferences and have earned numerous honors, including a Charles MacArthur Fellowship, four Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards, and two Drama-Logue Playwriting Awards. Thousands of individuals have already benefited from his workshops, and The Dramatic Writer's Companion promises to bring his remarkable creative method to an even wider audience.

ECHOING SILENCE: THOMAS MERTON ON THE VOCATION OF WRITING

ECHOING SILENCE: THOMAS MERTON ON THE VOCATION OF WRITING

By: Merton, Thomas
$18.95
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When Thomas Merton entered a Trappist monastery in December 1941, he turned his back on secular life--including a very promising literary career. He sent his journals, a novel-in-progess, and copies of all his poems to his mentor, Columbia professor Mark Van Doren, for safe keeping, fully expecting to write little, if anything, ever again. It was a relatively short-lived resolution, for Merton almost immediately found himself being assigned writing tasks by his Abbot--one of which was the autobiographical essay that blossomed into his international best-seller The Seven Storey Mountain. That book made him famous overnight, and for a time he struggled with the notion that the vocation of the monk and the vocation of the writer were incompatible. Monasticism called for complete surrender to the absolute, whereas writing demanded a tactical withdrawal from experience in order to record it. He eventually came to accept his dual vocation as two sides of the same spiritual coin and used it as a source of creative tension the rest of his life.

Merton's thoughts on writing have never been compiled into a single volume until now. Robert Inchausti has mined the vast Merton literature to discover what he had to say on a whole spectrum of literary topics, including writing as a spiritual calling, the role of the Christian writer in a secular society, the joys and mysteries of poetry, and evaluations of his own literary work. Also included are fascinating glimpses of his take on a range of other writers, including Henry David Thoreau, Flannery O'Connor, Dylan Thomas, Albert Camus, James Joyce, and even Henry Miller, along with many others.

ELEMENTS OF STYLE ILLUSTRATED

ELEMENTS OF STYLE ILLUSTRATED

By: White, E B
$18.00
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"So friendly, so classic, so delightful . . . Kalman has taken 'the little book' and made it even more elegant and uplifting." --Los Angeles Times

The only style manual to ever appear on a bestseller list now refreshed by one of our most beloved illustrators

Every English writer knows Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. The book's mantra, make every word tell, is still on point. This much-loved classic, now in its fourth edition, will forever be the go-to guide when in need of a hint to make a turn of phrase clearer or a reminder on how to enliven prose with the active voice. The only style manual to ever appear on bestseller lists has explained to millions of readers the basic principals of plain English, and Maira Kalman's fifty-seven exquisite illustrations give the revered work a jolt of new energy, making the learning experience more colorful and clear.

ENGLISH GRAMMAR GERMAN STUDENTS

By: McGinty, Charles P
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ENGLISH THROUGH THE AGES

ENGLISH THROUGH THE AGES

By: Brohaugh, William
$24.99
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This comprehensive reference features the birth dates of more than 50,000 words -- from Old English to modern-day slang. Readers can avoid anachronisms and add accuracy to their writing.
ESSENTIAL ENGLISH GRAMMAR

ESSENTIAL ENGLISH GRAMMAR

By: Gucker, Philip
$6.95
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This English grammar has been specifically designed for the reader with limited learning time, who wishes to gain command of the important points of grammar needed for everyday speech and comprehension, yet does not wish to be unnecessarily burdened with archaic, highly literary, or seldom used forms. Summarizing all the major constructions, principles, and basic terminology, this book will provide the reader with a firm foundation in essential English grammar, whether English is his native tongue or a second language.
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EVERY BOOK ITS READER

By: Basbanes, Nicholas A
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Inspired by a landmark exhibition mounted by the British Museum in 1963 to celebrate five eventful centuries of the printed word, Nicholas A. Basbanes offers a lively consideration of writings that have "made things happen" in the world, works that have both nudged the course of history and fired the imagination of countless influential people.

In his fifth work to examine a specific aspect of book culture, Basbanes also asks what we can know about such figures as John Milton, Edward Gibbon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Adams, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Henry James, Thomas Edison, Helen Keller--even the notorious Marquis de Sade and Adolf Hitler--by knowing what they have read. He shows how books that many of these people have consulted, in some cases annotated with their marginal notes, can offer tantalizing clues to the evolution of their character and the development of their thought.

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EXPAND YOUR ENGLISH: A GUIDE TO IMPROVING YOUR ACADEMIC VOCABULARY

By: Hart, Steve
$28.00
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Writing academic prose in English is especially difficult for non-native speakers, largely because the standard vocabulary used in this genre can be quite different from colloquial English. Expand Your English A Guide to Improving Your Academic Vocabulary is a unique and invaluable guide that will enable the reader to overcome this hurdle. It will become the favourite go-to reference book for both beginners and for intermediate learners struggling with the complexities of English-language academic writing. Steve Hart covers 1,000 vocabulary items that are essential for good academic writing. The first section describes 200 key terms in detail, grouping them into logical sets of 10. Through careful repetition, the reader will find it easy to retain, retrieve, and reuse these essential phrases. The second section explains a further 800 terms, grouping them according to function, meaning, and the areas of an essay where they are likely to be used. The expansive scope of Expand Your English gives non-native speakers all the vocabulary tools they need to master this difficult style of writing.
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EXPERIENCE: THINKING, WRITING, LANGUAGE, RELIGION

By: Fischer, Norman
$39.95
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By what narrow path is the ineffable silence of Zen cleft by the scratch of a pen? The distilled insights of forty years, Norman Fischer's Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion is a collection of essays by Zen master Fischer about experimental writing as a spiritual practice.

Raised in a Conservative Jewish family, Fischer embraced the twin practices of Zen Buddhism and innovative poetics in San Francisco in the early 1970s. His work includes original poetry, descriptions of Buddhist practice, translations of the Hebrew psalms, and eclectic writings on a range of topics from Homer to Heidegger to Kabbalah. Both Buddhist priest and participant in avant-garde poetry's Language movement, Fischer has limned the fertile affinities and creative contradictions between Zen and writing, accumulating four decades of rich insights he shares in Experience.

Fischer's work has been deeply enriched through his collaborations with leading rabbis, poets, artists, esteemed Zen Buddhist practitioners, Trappist monks, and renowned Buddhist leaders, among them the Dalai Lama. Alone and with others, he has carried on a deep and sustained investigation into the intersection of writing and consciousness as informed by meditation.

The essays in this artfully curated collection range across divers, fascinating topics such as time, the Heart Sutra, God in the Hebrew psalms, the supreme "uselessness" of art making, "late work" as a category of poetic appreciation, and the subtle and dubious notion of "religious experience." From the theoretical to the revealingly personal, Fischer's essays, interviews, and notes point toward a dramatic expansion of the sense of religious feeling in writing.

Readers who join Fischer on this path in Experience can discover how language is not a description of experience, but rather an experience itself: shifting, indefinite, and essential.
FACING THE LION

FACING THE LION

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The third volume in the Writers on Life and Craft Series. Ellen Bryant Voight, X. J. Kennedy, Francine Prose, and Marvin Bell, among others, give intimate accounts of the struggle to create something worthy of being published and read.
FIGHT FOR ENGLISH

FIGHT FOR ENGLISH

By: Crystal, David
$11.95
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Weve all been taught that this sentence--"Driving in from the airport, the flags flapped furiously"--is wrong, wrong, wrong. But is it, asks David Crystal. Everyone knows what this sentence means. No one actually thinks that the flags were driving the car. Is this sentence really incorrect.
In The Fight for English, Crystal offers a stimulating account of the struggle between various schools of grammar to control how we write and speak. Ranging back a thousand years, to the anguished concerns of Aelfric the Grammarian, and illuminating the contributions of Samuel Johnson, Noah Webster, and many others, the book sheds light on ten centuries of warfare over spelling, punctuation, pronunciation, and much more. The author takes to task such take-no-prisoners grammarians as the well-known Lynn Truss (whose Eats, Shoots, and Leaves was a giant bestseller), arguing that we should say no to zero-tolerance prescriptive rules. Indeed, as one of the world's leading authorities on the English language, Crystal offers an original and authoritative counter-argument to the prescriptive agenda. He shows for instance that context is very important, that the dangling participle "driving in from the airport" is not wrong because the context makes the meaning clear. Moreover, even the hope for a standard system of spelling is in vain, since approximately 25 per cent of the words in a standard dictionary have more than one spelling (such as dark room and dark-room and darkroom).
Hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "fascinating and insightful, often funny," The Fight for English is a welcome breath of fresh air in the often stultifying debate over English usage.