A brilliant book. Concise chapters containing tasty chunks of great novels such asHardy, Dickens,
Austen, Amis,
Fitzgerald, Woolf,
Eliot, James
and novel conventions for the begining to the end via topics such as suspense, showing not telling, chapters, lists, monologues, the unreliable narrator. Whether you are blagging a topic amongst your literary friends or teaching your year 10s, this book is greatness.
More Elbow. A collection of essays. One article I particularly empathised with was called 'Pedagogy of the Bamboozled' and the essay from which the book gets its title promises to be a good read.
This is all about free writing - whether Elbow is comparing the exercises to growing (a developmental process -- I like organic imagery) or cooking (interacting with people, ideas, metaphors and symbols) as a writer of creative works and academic essays (there is a great personal testimony of Elbow's essay writing method as an 'autobiographical digression') I know what he is talking about. The actual exercises might be sophisticated for some low ability writers, but there are some experiments which I would love to try.
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