WHEN YOU IMAGINE THE NEXT 10 YEARSOF YOUR LIFE, WHAT DO YOU SEE? If you're drawing a blank, breaking into a sweat, or visualizing a finish line but not the course to get there, this book is for you.Live Like Fiction provides an original and provocative four-week roadmap to authoring your own life story, and a raft of surprising tactics to make it your reality. In 30 days, this book will help you:* Unearth your purpose and the values that drive you* Determine how to best spend your energy--andwith whom* Learn how to influence your way to the top withempathy, gratitude and persistenceFrancesco Marconi didn't just write the book on owning yoursuccess--he's lived it, as a journalist, speaker, strategy officer at The Associated Press, and fellow at Columbia School of Journalism. Now he layers the tricks of his trade on top of fresh scientific research to offer a compelling step-by-step approach to achievingbreakthrough professional growth. A must for every ambitious college graduate, job seeker, new hire--and anyone with a hunger to become the best version of themselves.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.

This enhanced eBook includes video, audio, photographic, and linked content, as well as a bonus short story. Hear TAMMY talk. Learn the origins of Minor Universe 31. See the TM-31. Take a trip in it. Photos and illustrations appear as hyperlinked endnotes. Video and audio are embedded directly in text. *Video and audio may not play on all readers. Check your user manual for details. National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award winner Charles Yu delivers his debut novel, a razor-sharp, ridiculously funny, and utterly touching story of a son searching for his father . . . through quantum space–time. Minor Universe 31 is a vast story-space on the outskirts of fiction, where paradox fluctuates like the stock market, lonely sexbots beckon failed protagonists, and time travel is serious business. Every day, people get into time machines and try to do the one thing they should never do: change the past. That’s where Charles Yu, time travel technician—part counselor, part gadget repair man—steps in. He helps save people from themselves. Literally. When he’s not taking client calls or consoling his boss, Phil, who could really use an upgrade, Yu visits his mother (stuck in a one-hour cycle of time, she makes dinner over and over and over) and searches for his father, who invented time travel and then vanished. Accompanied by TAMMY, an operating system with low self-esteem, and Ed, a nonexistent but ontologically valid dog, Yu sets out, and back, and beyond, in order to find the one day where he and his father can meet in memory. He learns that the key may be found in a book he got from his future self. It’s called How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and he’s the author. And somewhere inside it is the information that could help him—in fact it may even save his life. Wildly new and adventurous, Yu’s debut is certain to send shock waves of wonder through literary space–time.

Long ago, The Lord Aiduel emerged from the deserts of the Holy Land, possessed with divine powers. He used these to forcibly unify the peoples of Angall, before His ascension to heaven.

With lively style, good humor and insight, Robin Hemley helps you turn all that you experience into fresh and powerful fiction. By learning to "reimagine", you'll focus on translating real-world people and events into characters and scenes that happen on paper for the first time. You'll think "what if" instead of "what is" in order to take control of your material and cut loose the inhibitions of real life. In these pages, you'll learn how to hone your observation skills and fill your journal with rich and vivid details. (Because, as Hemley writes, "Life is in the details, and so is good fiction".) You'll see how to decide which ideas to bring to fiction and which ones to let go. And you'll learn how to: find the right form - novel, short story, vignette, memoir - for the story you want to tell; use "triggers" to start your reader's imagination rolling; keep your fiction emotionally honest by making the right choices between "the way it happened" and what the story dictates (ask "Is it believable?", not "Did it happen?"); create composites of real people and places that fit the unique needs of your story and empower your imagination; focus your fiction. Make sure everything, every character counts - and eliminate "people who sit at the end of the bar without a role to play"; fictionalize - ethically and legally - other people's stories. Learn your rights as a writer versus their rights to privacy. (Can you use actual names? When do you need to get permission?). To illustrate how writers feed their fiction with reality, Hemley uses examples from his own work and from fiction masters of yesterday and today. At the end of each chapter, challenging exercises help you apply the basictheories and push them even further. An adventurous read, Turning Life Into Fiction will help you create fiction that's just as strange and wonderful and "real" as the life that inspires it.

Arranged in chronological order, the novelist's lives are opinionated, informative, frequently funny and often shocking. Professor Sutherland's authors come from all over the world; their writings illustrate every kind of fiction from gothic, penny dreadfuls and pornography to fantasy, romance and high literature. The book shows the changing forms of the genre, and how the aspirations of authors to divert and sometimes to educate their readers, has in some respects radically changed over the centuries, and in others - such as their interest in sex and relationships - remained remarkably constant.

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE© IN LITERATURE 2013 A New York Times Notable Book A Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction A Best Book of the Year: The Atlantic, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, AV Club In story after story in this brilliant new collection, Alice Munro pinpoints the moment a person is forever altered by a chance encounter, an action not taken, or a simple twist of fate. Her characters are flawed and fully human: a soldier returning from war and avoiding his fiancée, a wealthy woman deciding whether to confront a blackmailer, an adulterous mother and her neglected children, a guilt-ridden father, a young teacher jilted by her employer. Illumined by Munro’s unflinching insight, these lives draw us in with their quiet depth and surprise us with unexpected turns. And while most are set in her signature territory around Lake Huron, some strike even closer to home: an astonishing suite of four autobiographical tales offers an unprecedented glimpse into Munro’s own childhood. Exalted by her clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, Dear Life shows how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.