"Essays that show how Smiley draws inspiration from across literary history to invigorate her own writing. Among the authors she examines are Marguerite de Navarre, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Franz Kafka, Halldor Laxness, and Jessica Mitford"--

When Marisol, a self-confident eighteen-year-old lesbian, moves to Cambridge, Massachusetts to work and try to write a novel, she falls under the spell of her beautiful but deceitful writing teacher, while also befriending a shy, vulnerable girl from Indiana.

"As the author of twenty-four novels, Elizabeth George is one of the most successful--and prolific--novelists today. In Mastering the Process, George offers readers a master class in the art and science of crafting a novel. For many writers, the biggest challenge is figuring out how to take that earliest glimmer of inspiration and shape it into a full-length novel. How do you even begin to transform a single idea to a complete book? Elizabeth George...

Forgotten Girl, a fifteen-year-old poet, is going through the most difficult time of her life--the breakup of her parents, and her mom's resulting depression--when she meets Random Boy, a hot guy who, like her, feels like an outcast and secretly writes poetry to deal with everything going on in his life. In The Lost Marble Notebook of Forgotten Girl & Random Boy, the couple's poems come together to tell their unique love story. The two nameless teenagers...

Twelve-year-old Meggie learns that her father, who repairs and binds books for a living, can "read" fictional characters to life when one of those characters abducts them and tries to force him into service.

Pablo, a failed Argentine novelist-turned-screenwriter, has been kidnapped by the greatest Latin American film director of all time and is kept in a basement where he works, day after day, on what he is told must at all costs be a great, world-changing screenplay. Every night, after finishing work on the script, Pablo writes in his notebook and every morning he crosses out what he wrote the night before.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic, beloved novel of two boy geniuses dreaming up superheroes in New York’s Golden Age of comics, now with special bonus material by the author—soon to be a Showtime limited series
 
“It's absolutely gosh-wow, super-colossal—smart, funny, and a continual pleasure to read.”—The Washington...

"A cleverly voiced psychological thriller about an unforgettable--and unsettling--friendship, with blood-chilling twists, crackling wit, and a thrumming pulse in its veins--from the nationally bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World and Survivor Song. What if the coolest girl you've ever met decided to be your friend? Art Barbara was so not cool. He was a seventeen-year-old high school loner in the late 1980s who listened to hair metal,...

"Rachel Cusk's Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinners and discourse. She goes swimming with an elderly Greek bachelor. The people she encounters speak, volubly, about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and...

"This hilarious Southern retelling of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice tells the story of two hard-headed Civil war historians who find that first impressions can be deceiving. Shelby Roswell, a Civil War historian and professor, is on the fast track to tenure--that is, until her new book is roasted by the famous historian Ransom Fielding in a national review. With her career stalled by a man she's never met, Shelby struggles to maintain her composure...