Bøger af Peter Selgin

Writing successful fiction is a balance between trusting one's own instincts and making the right conscious choices. In by Cunning & Craft, award-winning novelist and short-story writer Peter Selgin shows you how to combine the instinctive process of creation with sound technical ingenuity. With precise instruction and examples from classic and best-selling works, this authoritative guide helps you master all the essential fiction-wiring elements. Whether you're facing the blank pages of a first draft or trying to revise a completed manuscript, By Cunning & Craft provides you with the guidance you need to outfox common writing pitfalls and make sure your work isn't wanting in wit-or perfection.

""This book is mainly about two men who were very important to me. "The first was there at my conception; the second came along 13 years later. Both men shaped my personality. "The first man was my father, Paul Selgin, who, it so happens, was an inventor. The second was my eighth grade English teacher." Both Selgin's father and the man he calls "the teacher" led remarkable lives. Among other things, Paul Selgin invented the first dollar bill-changing-machine and helped design the so-called proximity fuse, which hastened the end of World War II. As for the teacher, he became a forceful advocate for human rights and diversity, championing the cause of indigenous peoples and refuges from Southeast Asia, while insisting that they not forget their history - ironically, since the teacher did everything he could to obliterate his own. As Selgin discovers only after their deaths, for very different reasons both men felt compelled to reinvent themselves. The Inventors is the story of how these two charismatic men shaped the author's life. It's also the story of a relationship between a boy and his teacher, a relationship that was equal parts inspiring and destructive. "--

A tour de force, Life Goes to the Movies is the love story of two straight men: a dark devil of a Vietnam vet-turned-filmmaker, and the naive Italian American innocent who follows him to the edge of madness and beyond. Funny, engaging, and entertaining, this is just a great story told well.Peter Selgin's short story collection Drowning Lessons won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He's also published book-length nonfiction and an award-winning children's book. He's the fiction editor of Alimentum: The Literature of Food."e;Wonderfully innovative and elegantly crafted, Life Goes to the Movies brims with exuberance and wit. Both a celebrationand something of an elegy for the golden age of Hollywood, this novel reeled me in with its propulsive energy and won me over before I had finished chaper one."e;-- Frederick Reiken, author of The Lost Legends of New Jersey"e;Life Goes to the Movies is the irresistable account of a passionate friendship between two young men, both star-struck by art. Selgin's vivid account of New York in the 1970s, his richly complex characters, his encyclopedic knowledge of film and his sense of how small the gap is between good luck and bad make this an utterly absorbing novel. A wonderful read."e;-- Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street"e;With Life Goes to the Movies, Peter Selgin aims far higher than most of us poor storytellers ever dare. From beginning to end, Ikept imagining the funnels of smoke that surely must have risen from his keyboard as he wrote this potent, superbly crafted, and wonderfully ambitious novel."e;-- Donald Ray Pollock, author of Knockemstiff

In all thirteen tales, Selgin exhibits a keen eye for the forces that push people toward-and sometimes beyond-their very human limits, forces as intrinsic, elemental, and elusive as the liquid that makes up two-thirds of their bodies. These stories remind us that of all bodies of water, none is deeper or more dangerous than our own.

Unlike other craft books on writing, Your First Page is based on the premise that almost everything that can go right or wrong in a work of fiction or memoir goes wrong or right on the first page.

In this modern-day picaresque, Peter Selgin narrates an artist's journey from unconventional roots through gritty experience to artistic achievement. With an elegant narrative voice that is, by turns, frank, witty, and acid-tongued, Selgin confronts his past while coming to terms with approaching middle age, reaching self-understanding tempered by reflection, regret, and a sharply self-deprecating sense of humour.