{"title":"Muse Books: The Iowa Series In Creativity And Writing","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"first-we-read-then-we-write-book-robert-d-richardson-9781609383473","title":"First We Read, Then We Write","description":"Writing was the central passion of Emerson s life. While his thoughts on the craft are well developed in The Poet, The American Scholar, Nature, Goethe, and Persian Poetry, less well known are the many pages in his private journals devoted to the relationship between writing and reading. Here, for the first time, is the Concord Sage s energetic, exuberant, and unconventional advice on the idea of writing, focused and distilled by the preeminent Emerson biographer at work today. \u003cbr\u003eEmerson advised that the way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent. First We Read, Then We Write contains numerous such surprises from every word we speak is million-faced to talent alone cannot make a writer but it is no mere collection of aphorisms and exhortations. Instead, in Robert Richardson s hands, the biographical and historical context in which Emerson worked becomes clear. Emerson s advice grew from his personal experience; in practically every moment of his adult life he was either preparing to write, trying to write, or writing. Richardson shows us an Emerson who is no granite bust but instead is a fully fleshed, creative person disarmingly willing to confront his own failures. Emerson urges his readers to try anything strategies, tricks, makeshifts speaking not only of the nuts and bolts of writing but also of the grain and sinew of his determination. Whether a writer by trade or a novice, every reader will find something to treasure in this volume. Fearlessly wrestling with the birthing stage of art, Emerson s counsel on being a reader and writer will be read and reread for years to come.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49585274421521,"sku":"GOR009468515","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50395091173649,"sku":"CIN1609383478G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51249809752337,"sku":"NIN9781609383473","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1609383478.jpg?v=1751276614"},{"product_id":"myself-and-some-other-being-book-daniel-robinson-9781609382322","title":"Myself and Some Other Being","description":"\u003cdiv\u003eAs a young writer with neither profession nor money, William Wordsworth committed himself to a career as a poet, embracing what he believed was his destiny. But even the \"giant Wordsworth,\" as his friend and collaborator Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him, had his doubts. In \u003ci\u003eMyself and Some Other Being\u003c\/i\u003e, Daniel Robinson presents a young Wordsworth, as ambitious and insecure as any writer starting out, who was trying to prove to himself that he could become the great poet he desired to be and that Coleridge, equally brilliant and insecure, believed he already was.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eMyself and Some Other Being\u003c\/i\u003e is the story of Wordsworth becoming \u003ci\u003eWordsworth\u003c\/i\u003e by writing the fragments and drafts of what would eventually become \u003ci\u003eThe Prelude\u003c\/i\u003e, an autobiographical epic poem addressed to Coleridge that he hid from the public and was only published after his death in 1850. Feeling pressured to write the greatest epic poem of all time, a task set for him by Coleridge, Wordsworth feared that he was not up to the challenge and instead looked inside himself for memories and materials that he might make into poetry using the power of his imagination. What he found there was another Wordsworth--not exactly the memory of his younger self but rather \"some other being\" that he could adapt for an innovative kind of life-writing that he hoped would justify his writing life. By writing about himself and that other being, Wordsworth created an innovative autobiographical epic of becoming that \u003ci\u003eis\u003c\/i\u003e the masterpiece he believed he had failed to write.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e In focusing on this young, ambitious, yet insecure Wordsworth struggling to find his place among other writers, Robinson ably demonstrates how \u003ci\u003eThe Prelude\u003c\/i\u003e may serve as a provocative, instructive, and inspirational rumination on the writing of one's own life. Concentrating on the process of Wordsworth's endless revisions, the real literary business of creativity, Robinson puts Wordsworth forward as a model and inspiration for the next generation of writers.\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49939215352081,"sku":"CIN1609382323G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1609382323.jpg?v=1751088318"},{"product_id":"infuriating-american-book-hal-crowther-9781609382810","title":"An Infuriating American","description":"\u003cdiv\u003eAs American journalism shape-shifts into multimedia pandemonium and seems to diminish rapidly in influence and integrity, the controversial career of H. L. Mencken, the most powerful individual journalist of the twentieth century, is a critical text for anyone concerned with the balance of power between the free press, the government, and the corporate plutocracy. Mencken, the belligerent newspaperman from Baltimore, was not only the most outspoken pundit of his day but also, by far, the most widely read, and according to many critics the most gifted American writer ever nurtured in a newsroom--a vanished world of typewriter banks and copy desks that electronic advances have precipitously erased.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Nearly 60 years after his death, Mencken's memory and monumental verbal legacy rest largely in the hands of literary scholars and historians, to whom he will always be a curious figure, unchecked and alien and not a little distasteful. No faculty would have voted him tenure. Hal Crowther, who followed in many of Mencken's footsteps as a reporter, magazine editor, literary critic, and political columnist, focuses on Mencken the creator, the observer who turned his impressions and prejudices into an inimitable group portrait of America, painted in prose that charms and glowers and endures. Crowther, himself a working polemicist who was awarded the \u003ci\u003eBaltimore Sun\u003c\/i\u003e's Mencken prize for truculent commentary, examines the origin of Mencken's thunderbolts--where and how they were manufactured, rather than where and on whom they landed.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Mencken was such an outrageous original that contemporary writers have made him a political shuttlecock, defaming or defending him according to modern conventions he never encountered. Crowther argues that loving or hating him, admiring or despising him are scarcely relevant. Mencken can inspire and he can appall. The point is that he mattered, at one time enormously, and had a lasting effect on the national conversation. No writer can afford to ignore his craftsmanship or success, or fail to be fascinated by his strange mind and the world that produced it. This book is a tribute--though by no means a loving one--to a giant from one of his bastard sons.\u003cbr\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50095709389073,"sku":"CIN1609382811G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51417584730385,"sku":"CIN1609382811VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1609382811.jpg?v=1751276612"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/muse-books-the-iowa-series-in-creativity-and-writing-book-series.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}