From legendary writer Paul Theroux comes an atmospheric novel following a big-wave surfer as he confronts aging, privilege, mortality, and whose lives we choose to remember.

A fully revised and updated edition with writing prompts and challenges in every chapter Today’s writers need more spunk than Strunk: whether it's the Great American e-mail, Madison Avenue advertising, or Grammy Award-winning rap lyrics, memorable writing must jump off the page. Copy veteran Constance Hale is on a mission to make creative communication, both the lyrical and the unlawful, an option for everyone. With its crisp, witty tone, Sin and Syntax covers grammar’s ground rules while revealing countless unconventional syntax secrets (such as how to use—Gasp!—interjections or when to pepper your prose with slang) that make for sinfully good writing. Discover how to: *Distinguish between words that are “pearls” and words that are “potatoes” * Avoid “couch potato thinking” and “commitment phobia” when choosing verbs * Use literary devices such as onomatopoeia, alliteration, and metaphor (and understand what you're doing) Everyone needs to know how to write stylish prose—students, professionals, and seasoned writers alike. Whether you’re writing to sell, shock, or just sing, Sin and Syntax—now celebrating 20 years in print—is the guide you need to improve your command of the English language.

How to defeat a problem that faces all writers.

Here is a personal and compassionate book for everyone writers, poets, teachers, lovers of life, and especially those seeking to find their writing voices again or for the first time. It is an autobiographical travelogue moving from a volcano in Hawaii to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and places in between, with writing at its heart. Writing Toward Home offers practical advice on overcoming some of the obstacles writers of all ages face: writer's block, fear of rejection, confronting silencing critics in your head, finding the time to write. Each short chapter speaks to the larger truths about writing and how to truly live the writer's life: how to become more of a risk taker, how to excavate the past as a source, and how to become an acute observer of the world. Writing Toward Home is a book that will remind you-and help you remind your students-that the true source of writing is the creative self. In this fast culture when most people have so little time to do anything but menial tasks, it will jumpstart you, it will awaken to you the journey within, it will make you want to write.

With 101 stories from published writers who stuck with it and succeeded, you will be inspired and encouraged, whether you’re an aspiring author, a blogger, or a bestselling writer. No matter the genre, no matter the medium, the writing process is hard! But you will find inspiration, encouragement, and advice in these 101 stories from others who have stuck with it, through the setbacks and struggles, and successfully went from dreaming about writing to being a writer.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An essential volume for generations of writers young and old. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this modern classic will continue to spark creative minds for years to come. Anne Lamott is "a warm, generous, and hilarious guide through the writer’s world and its treacherous swamps" (Los Angeles Times). “Superb writing advice…. Hilarious, helpful, and provocative.” —The New York Times Book Review For a quarter century, more than a million readers—scribes and scribblers of all ages and abilities—have been inspired by Anne Lamott’s hilarious, big-hearted, homespun advice. Advice that begins with the simple words of wisdom passed down from Anne’s father—also a writer—in the iconic passage that gives the book its title: “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 down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, ‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”