The Art Of Friction

"We live in an Enquirer, reality television–addled world, a world in which most college students receive their news from the Daily Show and discourse via text message," assert Charles Blackstone and Jill Talbot. "Recently, two nonfiction writers have been criticized for falsifying memoirs. Oprah excoriated James Frey on her show; Nasdijj was impugned by Sherman Alexie in Time. Is our next trend in literature to lock down such boundaries among the literati? Or should we address the fictionalizing of nonfiction, the truth of fiction?" The Art of Friction surveys the borderlands where fiction and nonfiction intersect, commingle, and challenge genre lines. It anthologizes nineteen creative works by contemporary, award-winning writers including Junot Díaz, Jonathan Safran Foer, Thomas Beller, Bernard Cooper, Wendy McClure, and Terry Tempest Williams, who also provide companion pieces in which they comment on their work. These selections, which place short stories and personal essays (and hybrids of the two) side by side, allow readers to examine the similarities and differences between the genres, as well as explore the trends in genre overlap. Functioning as both a reader and a discussion of the craft of writing, The Art of Friction is a timely, essential book for all writers and readers who seek the truthfulness of lived experience through (non)fictions.

An in-depth friction fire field guide written be primitive skills instructor Chad Keel. Both the hand and bow drill are covered in detail and with practice you can quickly master these skills

Every industry around the globe is being completely disrupted. Stalwart brands are losing market share to upstarts that capture our collective consciousness. Trillions of dollars are at stake. Brands know a new approach is needed. But most don’t realize the strategic underpinnings need to change. Great brands are no longer built through interruptive advertisements. Friction argues that brands don't simply need clever messages or new, shiny technologies. They need a fundamental change in strategy. Friction provides a system for embracing transparency, engaging audiences, creating evangelists, and unleashing unprecedented growth. The authors of Friction have worked on some of the industry's most innovative assignments for the world’s most successful brands. This groundbreaking book reveals how corporations can divorce themselves from legacy business models to create a passion brand. A brand that breaks its addiction to traditional advertising. A brand that empowers its customers. A brand that dominates the competition.

This classic guide, from the renowned novelist and professor, has helped transform generations of aspiring writers into masterful writers—and will continue to do so for many years to come. John Gardner was almost as famous as a teacher of creative writing as he was for his own works. In this practical, instructive handbook, based on the courses and seminars that he gave, he explains, simply and cogently, the principles and techniques of good writing. Gardner’s lessons, exemplified with detailed excerpts from classic works of literature, sweep across a complete range of topics—from the nature of aesthetics to the shape of a refined sentence. Written with passion, precision, and a deep respect for the art of writing, Gardner’s book serves by turns as a critic, mentor, and friend. Anyone who has ever thought of taking the step from reader to writer should begin here.

In this entertaining and enlightening collection David Lodge considers the art of fiction under a wide range of headings, drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James, Martin Amis, Jane Austen and James Joyce. Looking at ideas such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and illustrating each topic with a passage taken from a classic or modern novel, David Lodge makes the richness and variety of British and American fiction accessible to the general reader. He provides essential reading for students, aspiring writers and anyone who wants to understand how fiction works.

After a courtroom gunman threatens everything he holds dear, a Texas Ranger with a checkered past must choose between vengeance and family in this #1 New York Times bestselling thriller. Crawford Hunt wants his daughter back. Following the death of his wife four years ago, he fell into a downward spiral that knocked him down to deskwork and landed his five-year-old daughter Georgia in the custody of her grandparents. But now that Crawford has cleaned up his act and met the court's requirements, the fate of his family lies with Judge Holly Spencer. Holly, ambitious and confident, must prove herself worthy of a permanent judgeship on the cusp of an upcoming election. Every decision is high-stakes, and despite Crawford's commitment to being a better father, Holly is wary of his past. But when a masked gunman barges into the courtroom during the custody hearing, Crawford reacts instinctively to save Holly's life. But his heroism soon takes on the taint of recklessness. With the gunman still at large, Crawford uncovers a horrifying truth, and the cloud over him grows even darker as he considers vengeance. He quickly realizes that pursuing the killer will jeopardize his chances of gaining custody of his daughter and compromise Holly, who needs protection not only from an assassin, but from Crawford himself and the forbidden attraction between them. Friction will keep you on the edge of your seat with breathtaking plot twists and the unforgettable characters that make Sandra Brown one of the world's best-loved authors. It is an extraordinary novel about the powerful ties that bind us to the ones we love and the secrets we keep to protect them.

What makes a story a story? What is style? What’s the connection between realism and real life? These are some of the questions James Wood answers in How Fiction Works, the first book-length essay by the preeminent critic of his generation. Ranging widely—from Homer to David Foster Wallace, from What Maisie Knew to Make Way for Ducklings—Wood takes the reader through the basic elements of the art, step by step. The result is nothing less than a philosophy of the novel—plainspoken, funny, blunt—in the traditions of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel and Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. It sums up two decades of insight with wit and concision. It will change the way you read.

Fire can fascinate, inspire, capture the imagination and bring families and communities together. It has the ability to amaze, energise and touch something deep inside all of us. For thousands of years, at every corner of the globe, humans have been huddling around fires: from the basic and primitive essentials of light, heat, energy and cooking, through to modern living, fire plays a central role in all of our lives. The ability to accurately and quickly light a fire is one of the most important skills anyone setting off on a wilderness adventure could possess, yet very little has been written about it. Through his narrative Hume also meditates on the wider topics surrounding fire and how it shapes the world around us.

The stories we tell in our attempt to make sense of the world—our myths and religion, literature and philosophy, science and art—are the comforting vehicles we use to transmit ideas of order. But beneath the quest for order lies the uneasy dread of fundamental disorder. True chaos is hard to imagine and even harder to represent. In this book, Martin Meisel considers the long effort to conjure, depict, and rationalize extreme disorder, with all the passion, excitement, and compromises the act provokes. Meisel builds a rough history from major social, psychological, and cosmological turning points in the imagining of chaos. He uses examples from literature, philosophy, painting, graphic art, science, linguistics, music, and film, particularly exploring the remarkable shift in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from conceiving of chaos as disruptive to celebrating its liberating and energizing potential. Discussions of Sophocles, Plato, Lucretius, Calderon, Milton, Haydn, Blake, Faraday, Chekhov, Faulkner, Wells, and Beckett, among others, are matched with incisive readings of art by Brueghel, Rubens, Goya, Turner, Dix, Dada, and the futurists. Meisel addresses the revolution in mapping energy and entropy and the manifold effect of thermodynamics. He then uses this chaotic frame to elaborate on purpose, mortality, meaning, and mind.