The Book of Dialogue is an invaluable resource for writers and students of narrative seeking to master the art of effective dialogue. The book will teach you how to use dialogue to lay the groundwork for events in a story, to balance dialogue with other story elements, to dramatize events through dialogue, and to strategically break up dialogue with other vital elements of your story in order to capture and hold a reader's or viewer's interest in the overall arc of the narrative. Writers will find Turco's classic an essential reference for crafting dialogue. Using dialogue to teach dialogue, Turco's chapters focus on narration, diction, speech, and genre dialogue. Through the Socratic dialogue method - invented by Plato in his dialogues outlining the teachings of Socrates - Turco provides an effective tool to teach effective discourse. He notes, "Plato wrote lies in order to tell the truth. That's what a fiction writer does and has always done". Now it's your turn.

The much-anticipated second edition of The Book of Literary Terms features new examples and terms to enhance Turco's classic guide that students and scholars have relied on over the years as a definitive resource for the definitions of the major terms, forms, and styles of literature. Chapters covering fiction, drama, nonfiction, and literary criticism and scholarship offer readers a comprehensive guide to all forms of prose and their many sub-genres. From "Utopian novel", "videotape", and "yellow journalism", to "kabuki play", "Personalism", and "Poststructuralism", this book is a valuable reference offering an extensive world of knowledge. Every teacher, student, critic, and general lover of literature should be sure to add The Book of Literary Terms to their library.

Now in its fifth edition, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics continues to be the go-to reference and guide for students, teachers, and critics. A companion for poets from novice to master, The Book of Forms has been called "the poet's bible" for more than fifty years. Filled with both common and rarely heard of forms and prosodies, Turco's engaging style and apt examples invite writers to try their hands at exploring forms in ways that challenge and enrich their work. Revised for today's poet, the fifth edition includes the classic rules of scansion and the useful Form-Finder Index alongside new examples of terms and prose that are essential to the study of all forms of poetry and verse. As Turco writes in the introduction, "It should go without saying that the more one knows how to do, the more one can do".