Penguin Books Australia

There are many ways prospective authors routinely sabotage their own work. Misstep by misstep, How Not to Write a Novel shows how you can ensure your manuscript never rises above the level of unpublishable sputum, that the characters in your opus are unpleasant, dimensionless versions of yourself, that your plot is digressive, tedious and unconvincing, and that your style is reliant on mangled clichés...

Borges' On Writing is designed to offer a comprehensive and balanced account of the evolution of Borges' thinking on the craft of writing, an intense and perennial concern of his. Borges had a remarkable impact on writers in the USA, Britain, Italy, France and many other countries. His essays were perceived to have anticipated some of the principal topics of modern literary theory, from Russian formalism...

Today's A collection of personal writing exercises and commentary from some of today's best novelists, short story writers, and writing teachers, including Jill McCorkle, Amy Bloom, Robert Olen Butler, Steve Almond, Jayne Anne Phillips, Virgil Suarez, Margot Livesay, and more.

'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...