It seemed a natural fit for Writers of the Round Table Press to publish the print versions.” “With those in hand I went out acting as an agent, contacting authors and their agents/publishers and signing them up for the series. Arda hired Writers of the Round Table Press to “produce three prototypes for the series as proof of the concept,” Blake said. Arda came to Blake with the notion of selecting popular self-help, business and motivational nonfiction and turning them in lively, visually appealing comics, for a “generation of readers who want valuable information in quick, easy to understand bits,” Blake said.īlake said that he was impressed by Arda’s concept. The books were produced by Writers of the Round Table Press, a book packaging firm founded by Corey Michael Blake, for SmarterComics, a Silicon Valley company founded by Franco Arda. The books will be distributed by National Book Network. The SmarterComics line of adaptations will launch in 2011 with books based on bestsellers by tough-love personal motivator Larry Winget, Latino entrepreneur Robert Renteria sales and marketing guru Tom Hopkins, performance psychologist John Eliot and internet distribution visionary and Wired magazine editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson. Book packager Writers of the Round Table has teamed up with nonfiction comics publisher SmarterComics to produce a line of comics works based on bestselling business, motivational and personal self-help titles.
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It's no good, when you've finished a book that fundamentally doesn't work (as I have: and no, it never got published), to hear, "Oh, but I bet you learned so many new techniques from sucking for 250 pages!" That really is the worst thing to hear, but it IS the best thing to believe, otherwise you might never get out of bed in the morning. We all know that people can fail without there being anything redeeming in the failure itself, and it's good to remember this, and be empathetic to those who fail-especially when we are the ones who have-because ultimately the rhetoric of success-via-failure doesn't really hear the frustration of the person experiencing it. Personally, I vacillate between wanting to believe the cliché that failure is a creative pathway to success and actively rejecting it. On the other, there is grammatically a difference between where this beauty lies-outside the self in the light as the line reads-and where failure exists, which is inside the speaker's sense of self. On the one hand I think this moment might fall in line with the old saw that our failures are what make us human and thus beautiful. to fail the way I've failed / in every particular sense of myself, / in every new and beautiful light.” Would you talk of how this differs from the cliché of failure as a creative pathway to success? Your opening poem “Strawberry” in The Invention of the Kaleidoscope ends, “. This interview was conducted over e-mail by Sheila McMullin. She describes the wave of fundamentalist fervor that swept through Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s, imposing increasing limits on women. Saudi religious police enforce a harsh array of laws and customs-women must cover their bodies completely, and unrelated men and women must never mix.Īl-Sharif gives a compelling account of her impoverished, sometimes violent upbringing in Mecca, and of her schooling, where teachers beat students for trivial infractions and religious studies were paramount. Without a male guardian, Saudi women can’t rent an apartment, take out a loan, get an ID or register a child for school-and they can never drive, not even to take a sick child to the ER. Her crime: driving her brother’s Hyundai, because in Saudi Arabia, women do not drive. Manal al-Sharif’s memoir Daring to Drive opens with a chilling sentence: “The secret police came for me at two in the morning.” Al-Sharif is questioned for hours and then jailed in a filthy, overcrowded women’s prison. She turns out to be a supporter of czarist rule who recently escaped the carnage of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. To confound matters further, he later finds out that his uncle, Lord Melrose, has recently asked the very same Sophia to marry him. Lennox has no idea who the man might be nor how he ended up delivered, like a parcel, to his property, but then he finds a sheet of paper hidden in the corpse’s coat with a stranger’s name written on it: Countess Sophia Androvich Zerevki Polyakov. Heathcliff Lennox, a veteran of the First World War, receives distressing news from his butler, Greggs: There’s a dead man lying on his doorstep-truly an uncommon circumstance in sleepy rural England-which kicks off Menuhin’s often humorous story. An English gentleman finds his inheritance threatened as he’s accused of murder in this mannered comedic mystery. In this interview, Okparanta discusses finding the emotional heart of a story, writing within an omnipresent past, and whether a writer’s present location affects her writing. To read an exercise on manipulating chronology in order to create character, click here. She was born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies by Bread Loaf, the Jentel Foundation, the Hermitage Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and Hedgebrook. Henry Award and the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. Chinelo Okparanta is the author of the novel Under the Udala Trees and the story collection Happiness, Like Water.Ĭhinelo Okparanta is the author of the story collection Happiness, Like Water and the novel Under the Udala Trees. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, among others, and she was short-listed for the 2013 Caine Prize in African Writing. Luckily for Tim, he also has allies in the supernatural realms. Tim doesn't believe in magic, of course, but it turns out that magic certainly believes in him - at least enough that some of its practitioners are already actively planning his untimely death. But Timothy Hunter is also unlike nearly everyone else on Earth, and he's about to learn the reason why. Timothy Hunter is like any other 13-year-old boy, aimlessly filling his days with television and skateboarding. "It is up to the four of us to ensure that he chooses his path correctly." "He has the potential to become the most powerful human adept of this age." Show him what magic truly is, and what it was, and what it may become." The New York Times best-selling writer Neil Gaiman weaves a mesmerizing tale of the dangers and possibilities of youth in THE BOOKS OF MAGIC, illustrated by the acclaimed artists John Bolton, Scott Hampton, Charles Vess, and Paul Johnson. This fascinating secret world of signals is what German forester Peter Wohlleben explores in The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate ( public library). Hermann Hesse called them “the most penetrating of preachers.” A forgotten seventeenth-century English gardener wrote of how they “speak to the mind, and tell us many things, and teach us many good lessons.”īut trees might be among our lushest metaphors and sensemaking frameworks for knowledge precisely because the richness of what they say is more than metaphorical - they speak a sophisticated silent language, communicating complex information via smell, taste, and electrical impulses. Since the dawn of our species, they have been our silent companions, permeating our most enduring tales and never ceasing to inspire fantastical cosmogonies. Trees dominate the world’s the oldest living organisms. I say presumably because one of the main weaknesses of The Nameless City is not taking the impact of generations of conquest as serious as is warranted. the residents of the city, presumably made up of “generations” of residents who have survived the cycles of occupation. Rat is a member of the group known only as “The Named,” i.e. Kaidu is a member of the Dao people, the current occupiers of the city. In Hicks’s universe, “different worlds” pretty much breaks down to “conquerors” and “conquered.” The main action takes place in the titular “Nameless City” - a city, valuable for trade due to its location at the opening of a river passage, that has been the subject of repeated cycles of conquest over generations. The main plot revolves around two characters, Rat and Kaidu, who become best friends even though they are from different worlds. The Nameless City is the first in a series. Sanderson uses plot twists that he teases enough for readers to pick up on to distract from the more dramatic reveals he has in store' AV Club he's simply a brilliant writer' Patrick Rothfuss Praise for Brandon Sanderson's #1 New York Times Bestselling RECKONERS series: but their desperation to survive might just take her skyward. They've doubled their fleet, making Spensa's world twice as dangerous. And the Krell just made that a possibility. No one will let Spensa forget what her father did, but she is still determined to fly. But her fate is intertwined with her father's - a pilot who was killed years ago when he abruptly deserted his team, placing Spensa's chances of attending flight school somewhere between slim and none. Spensa has always dreamed of being one of them of soaring above Earth and proving her bravery. Pilots have become the heroes of what's left of the human race. Humanity's only defense is to take to their ships and fight the enemy in the skies. An alien race called the Krell leads onslaught after onslaught from the sky in a never-ending campaign to destroy humankind. Spensa's world has been under attack for hundreds of years. Tain is called upon to take up his uncle’s mantle, despite the heir being young and untried. Both Chancellor Caslav and Etan fall to a powerful poison, one that is unknown even to Jovan and his extensive records of poisonous substances. But due to Kalina’s poor health, it was Jovan who was ultimately given the role of official proofer, whose task involves taste-testing Caslav’s food and drink for any signs of poison before it is consumed by the chancellor or his family. From a young age, both Jovan and his sister Kalina have been trained by their uncle, the spymaster Etan, to identify all kinds of harmful substances, which sometimes involved being poisoned themselves in order to learn and become inured to their effects. Their job can be likened to that of Secret Service, keeping Chancellor Caslav of Silasta and his nephew Tain safe from unseen threats, though recognizing signs of poison is their specialty. “I was seven years old the first time my uncle poisoned me,” begins our protagonist Jovan, who is one half of a pair of highborn siblings whose family the Oromanis have long been entrusted to serve a sacred duty. This does not affect the contents of my review and all opinions are my own.Ĭity of Lies might not have completely won over my heart, but I will however give it the award for the most intriguing opening line I’ve read all year. I received a review copy from the publisher. |