Book & CD Store for Writers - Page 6
“Movies, Fiction & Other Fascinating
Stuff About Writers”
This volume cost me two or three good pages as I peeked in on Eudora Welty and read about her anticipated six o'clock bourbon, glanced at books on Tennessee Williams's shelves and wondered if Veronica Chambers ever gets a stiff neck from writing on her laptop like that.
—From a book review for The Writer's Desk by Jill Krementz
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Movies, Fiction & Other Fascinating Stuff About Writers
Bookstore Contents - Page 6
Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education
Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts
More Titles Coming Soon
“Drinking the Rain”
by Alix Kates Shulman
Review by Milli Thornton
Hitting fifty means settling down, right?
Wrong, it means challenging yourself to the depths or your soul—at least for this remarkable woman, a novelist and activist who leaves her family behind in Manhattan to rough it on an island off the coast of Maine.
Alix lives without plumbing, power or telephones and even forages for her own food. She immerses herself in solitude and the sensualities of mussel stew. In bare feet, Alix gathers wild lettuce that she would have paid $36 a pound for back at the Yuppie market in Greenwich Village.
But deeper things go on, even while she embraces the joys of seaweed. This is a delicate book, even though Alix is robust enough to survive alone on an island in rustic conditions. What she learns about herself is like living life without wearing a watch. The reader feels privy to an intimacy and a life rhythm that we are all born with but soon forget in the hustle and bustle of “making it.”
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“The Writer's Desk”
by Jill Krementz
A dangerous book—deadly to keep on your desk as Jill Krementz's compelling photos of authors at work will lure you back again and again, leaving your own writing untended. This volume cost me two or three good pages as I peeked in on Eudora Welty and read about her anticipated six o'clock bourbon, glanced at books on Tennessee Williams's shelves and wondered if Veronica Chambers ever gets a stiff neck from writing on her laptop like that.
The Writer's Desk is a perfect gift for readers, yes, but if you're a writer, well, you've been warned. —Amazon.com
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“Jigsaw: An Unsentimental Education”
by Sybille Bedford
Review by Milli Thornton
I was initially attracted to this book as the memoir of a writer, but her being a writer is almost incidental to the story. A better reason for reading it: to be privy to a life outside the framework we've come to accept as "normal" in the USA.
Sybille Bedford writes her autobiography as though it is a novel. Her heroine, Billi, has a rather bizarre childhood—first with her impoverished father in the German castle he was once baron of, and then with her beautiful, headstrong mother and her mother's much younger lover in Sanary, on the Mediterranean coast of France. (While that doesn't sound overly bizarre, telling more details will give too much away.)
When I first started reading JIGSAW, I thought the author was a rather messy writer and the story cumbersome. I kept reading and became engrossed. Eventually, the book becomes one of those you're very, very sorry to see end. I missed Billi for several days after devouring the final page.
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“A Place to Stand”
by Jimmy Santiago Baca
Review by Milli Thornton
Jimmy Santiago Baca is the recipient of major awards for his raw and emotional poetry. These awards are, in my opinion, more special than the average literary awards for they've been earned by a man whose literacy was extremely hard won.
After his parents abandoned him, he grew up in orphanages and detention centers. Jimmy landed himself in a maximum-security prison for selling drugs, with a no-parole sentence of five to ten years. His account of prison life makes prison movies look civilized.
It is also the account of how Jimmy fought for the privilege to teach himself how to read—and then to write, by corresponding with Harry (a Christian man on the outside), and by writing poems for other cons in exchange for books.
A PLACE TO STAND is a memoir of Jimmy's childhood, his career selling drugs, and his time in prison. The epilogue tells the shocking tale of his mother's death. This is not a pretty history, but it's an inspiration to all writers and a testimony to the human spirit.
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“Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts”
by Georges Jean
includes 128 pages of glossy illustrations
The history of writing is an epic that spans six thousand years, from the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates to the shores of the Mediterranean. From hieroglyphics and cuneiform to the invention of printing and the rich world of modern lettering, here is writing's mysterious course as it has evolved through the ages. Writing lies at the root of our civilization; it is the accumulated memory of mankind.
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“The Midnight Writers”
by C. J. Hannah
A very frustrated writer stalks a week long writer's conference with the aim of getting enough publicity to interest a publisher. The writer kills four other would-be writers. Che Hadley, a workshop leader, after two murders, thinks he knows who the killer is. When Che knows for certain, he's presented with an ethical dilemma; an editor wants him to writer the killer's story, but that isn't all. So does the killer.
About the Author
C. J. Hannah, author of Ashes to The Wind [Avon 1978] and The Ghost Dancers [FictionNet, 1998] and 100+ short stories, is also founder of the Asilomar Writer's Consortium. He was a workshop leader at the Santa Barbara Writer's Conference for the first seven years, and is currently a workhshop leader for the Southern California Writer's Conference at San Diego and Oxnard. He has also taught creative writing at the university level.
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