Constructive and accessible.
Palahniuk (Adjustment Day, 2018, etc.) offers a comradely handbook on writing.
After enduring a travesty of a writing workshop, the author resolved to produce a tough-love manual on fiction writing. Palahniuk’s own work had benefited immeasurably from a different workshop conducted by Tom Spanbauer, whom he credits lavishly. A journalist by training, Palahniuk is known for a minimalist, conversational writing style and transgressive fiction featuring marginalized characters, but the strategies collected here can benefit any student of writing. Ranging from the nuts-and-bolts mechanics to the community of readers, his advice is highly detailed and practical, if occasionally tinged with romantic notions that belie his literary reputation for nihilism. And it's more than merely the tricks of the trade. Not surprising for a writer whose novel Fight Club was adapted for a successful film, Palahniuk illustrates many of his points using movie references and metaphors, sometimes to excess. He reveals possibilities that are not merely off the beaten track in publishing, but which possess a portion of originality. Many writers have pioneered the use of fictional techniques in writing nonfiction, but the author often reverses the process, to powerful effect. This is also a scrapbook of his writing life, brimming with personal anecdotes instructive, amusing, or bizarre. As in his stories, Palahniuk writes for the outsider in all of us, and he wants our wellsprings of story ideas to come from as deep a pool as his own. He closes with brief recommended fiction and nonfiction reading lists and a useful guide to troubleshooting. Palahniuk is a savvy teacher, though one's acceptance of the complete body of his guidelines may hinge on the appeal of his own fiction, his minimalist bent, or his insistence that writing also might be a form of exorcism: resolving intractable personal issues through fiction. The author confides one key dictum: Do not write to be liked but to be remembered.
Constructive and accessible.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1795-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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