Peter Turchi - Böcker

This big, beautiful anthology of short fiction is for readers, writers, and anyone curious about the mysterious processes of literary minds. All contributors have been recent faculty members of the prestigious Warren Wilson Low Residency Program, including such literary favorites as Margot Livesey, Charles Baxter, Robert Boswell, Jim Shepard, Antonya Nelson, David Shields, and the editors themselves.Each writer was asked to submit an original story, accompanied by an essay describing the challenges of the story and how they were met. Since writers resist herding, the editors were happily surprised by the wide range of essays—"fiction writers, when given the space, think about their work very differently." We learn about the genesis of a story, how story evolves, what was eventually relinquished and why, and how a story—surprisingly—might "insist" on changing.Arranged alphabetically by author, and beginning with Richard Russo's cogent introduction, this volume is a treasure throughout.

In Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, seventeen award-winning writers--all expert teachers--share the secrets of creating compelling, imaginative stories and novels. A combination handbook, writer's companion, and collection of spirited personal essays, the book is filled with specific examples, hard-won wisdom, and compassionate guidance for the developing or experienced fiction writer.Each of the contributors is a current or former lecturer at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, one of the most highly respected writing programs in the country. Included are essays by Charles Baxter, Robert Boswell, Karen Brennan, Judith Grossman, Ehud Havazelet, C. J. Hribal, Margot Livesey, Michael Martone, Kevin McIlvoy, Pablo Medina, Antonya Nelson, Susan Neville, Richard Russo, Steven Schwartz, Jim Shepard, Joan Silber, Debra Spark, Peter Turchi, and Chuck Wachtel.Rich with masterful examples and personal anecdotes, these imaginative essays provide hard-earned insight into a writer's work. The book will interest not only those seeking inspiration and guidance to become stronger writers, but also readers of contemporary literary fiction, who will find a number of surprising and original approaches to the writer's work by award-winning practitioners adept at teaching others what they know.Charles Baxter is author of several novels, including The Feast of Love, Shadow Play, and First Light. and collections of stories including Believers and A Relative Stranger. He teaches writing at the University of Michigan. Peter Turchi is author of the novel The Girls Next Door, a collection of stories, Magician, and a book of non-fiction, The Pirate Prince. He is Director of the MFA Program for Writers, Warren Wilson College.

This book tells us how maps help us to understand where we are in the world in the same way that literature, whether realistic or experimental, attempts to explain our realities. "Maps of the Imagination" explores how writers and cartographers use many of the same devices for plotting and executing their work, making crucial decisions about what to include and what to leave out, in order to get us from here to there, without excess baggage or a confusing surplus of information.Turchi traces the history of maps, from their initial decorative and religious purposes to their later instructional applications. He describes how maps rely on projections in order to portray a three-dimensional world on the two-dimensional flat surface of paper, which he goes on to relate to what writers do in projecting a literary work from the imagination onto the page.Drawing from texts as varied as poetry by Louise Gluck, stories by Kate Chopin and Robert Coover, novels by Robert Louis Stevenson and Italo Calvino, the film "Memento", and Chuck Jones' "Roadrunner" cartoons, Turchi ranges across a wide literary geography, illustrating his argument with an array of maps and illustrations, which will be scattered throughout the text.

A Kite in the Wind is an anthology of essays by 20 veteran writers and master teachers. While the contributors offer specific, practical advice on such fundamental aspects of craft as characterization, character names, the first person point of view, and unreliable narrators, they also give extended, thoughtful consideration to more sophisticated topics, including "imminence," or the power of a sense of beginning; creating and maintaining tension; "lushness"; and the deliberate manipulation of information to create particular effects. The essays in A Kite in the Wind begin as personal investigations -- attempts to understand why a decision in a particular story or novel seemed unsuccessful; to define a quality or problem that seemed either unrecognized or unsatisfactorily defined; to understand what, despite years of experience as a fiction writer, resisted comprehension; and to pursue haunting, even unanswerable questions. Unlike a how-to book, the anthology is less an instruction manual than it is an intimate visit with twenty very different writers as they explore topics that excite, intrigue, and even puzzle them.Each discussion uses specific examples and illustrations, including both canonical stories and novels and writing less frequently discussed, from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, by both American and international authors. The contributors share their hard-earned insights for beginning and advanced writers with humility, wit, and compassion. The first section of the book focuses on narration, with particular attention paid to various kinds of narrators; the second, on strategic creation and presentation of character; the third, on some of the roles of the visual, beginning with establishing setting; and the fourth, on structural and organizational issues, from movement through time to the manipulation of information to create mystery and suspense.

With his characteristic talent for finding the connections between writing and the stuff of our lives (most notably in his earlier hit Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer), Peter Turchi ventures into new, and even more surprising, territory. In A Muse and a Maze, Turchi draws out the similarities between writing and puzzle-making and its flip side, puzzle-solving. He teases out how mystery lies at the heart of all storytelling. And he uncovers the magic--the creation of credible illusion--that writers share with the likes of Houdini and master magicians. In Turchi's associative narrative, we learn about the history of puzzles, their obsessive quality, and that Benjamin Franklin was a devotee of an ancient precursor of sudoku called Magic Squares. Applying this rich backdrop to the requirements of writing, Turchi reveals as much about the human psyche as he does about the literary imagination and the creative process. With the goal of giving writers new ways to think about their work and readers new ways to consider the books they encounter, A Muse and a Maze suggests ways in which every piece of writing is a kind of puzzle.The work argues that literary writing is defined, at least in part, by its embrace of mystery; offers tangrams as a model for the presentation of complex characters; compares a writer's relationship to his or her narrator to magicians and wizards; offers the maze and the labyrinth as alternatives to the more common notion of the narrative line; and concludes with a discussion of how readers and writers, like puzzle solvers, not only tolerate but find pleasure in difficulty. While always balancing erudition with accessibility, Turchi examines the work of writers as various as A. A. Milne, Dashiell Hammett, Truman Capote, Anton Chekhov, Alison Bechdel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Antonya Nelson, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles D'Ambrosio, Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Thomas Bernhard, and Mark Twain, elaborating and illuminating ways in which their works expand and deliver on the title's double entendre, A Muse and a Maze.With 100 images that range from movie stills from Citizen Kane and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to examples of sudokus, crosswords, and other puzzles; from Norman Rockwell's famous triple self-portrait to artwork by Charles Richie; and from historical arcana to today's latest magic, A Muse and a Maze offers prose exposition, images, text quotations, and every available form of wisdom, leading the reader step-by-step through passages from stories and novels to demonstrate, with remarkable clarity, how writers evolve their eventual creations.