The School Story: Young Adult Narratives in the Age of Neoliberalism examines the work of contemporary writers, filmmakers, and critics who, reflecting on the realm of school experience, help to shape dominant ideas of school. The creations discussed are mostly stories for children and young adults. David Aitchison looks at serious novels for teens including Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak and Faiza Guene's Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow, the light-hearted, middle-grade fiction of Andrew Clements and Tommy Greenwald, and Malala Yousafzai's autobiography for young readers, I Am Malala. He also responds to stories that take young people as their primary subjects in such novels as Sapphire's Push and films including Battle Royale and Cooties. Though ranging widely in their accounts of young life, such stories betray a mounting sense of crisis in education around the world, especially in terms of equity (the extent to which students from diverse backgrounds have fair chances of receiving quality education) and empowerment (the extent to which diverse students are encouraged to gain strength, confidence, and selfhood as learners). Drawing particular attention to the influence of neoliberal initiatives on school experience, this book considers what it means when learning and success are measured more and more by entrepreneurship, competitive individualism, and marketplace gains. Attentive to the ways in which power structures, institutional routines, school spaces, and social relations operate in the contemporary school story, The School Story offers provocative insights into a genre that speaks profoundly to the increasingly precarious position of education in the twenty-first century.

Daniele Pitavy-Souques was a European powerhouse of Welty studies. In this collection of essays, Pitavy-Souques pours new light on Welty's view of the world and her international literary import, challenging previous readings of Welty's fiction, memoir, and photographs in illuminating ways. The nine essays collected here offer scholars, critics, and avid readers a new understanding and enjoyment of Welty's work. The volume explores beloved stories in Welty's masterpiece The Golden Apples, as well as "A Curtain of Green," "Flowers for Marjorie," "Old Mr. Marblehall," "A Still Moment," "Livvie," "Circe," "Kin," and The Optimist's Daughter, One Writer's Beginnings, and One Time, One Place. Essays include "Technique as Myth: The Structure of The Golden Apples" (1979), "A Blazing Butterfly: The Modernity of Eudora Welty" (1987), and others written between 2000 and 2018. Together, they reveal and explain Welty's brilliance for employing the particular to discover the universal. Pitavy-Souques, who briefly lived in and often revisited the South, met with Welty several times in her Jackson, Mississippi, home. Her readings draw on the visual arts, European theorists, and styles of modernism, postmodernism, surrealism, as well as the baroque and the gothic. The included essays reflect Pitavy-Souques's European education, her sophisticated understanding of intellectual theories and artistic movements abroad, and her passion for the literary achievement of women of genius. The Eye That Is Language: A Transatlantic View of Eudora Welty reveals the way in which Welty's narrative techniques broaden her work beyond southern myths and mysteries into a global perspective of humanity.

Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat is one of the most recognized writers today. Her debut novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was an Oprah Book Club selection, and works such as Krik? Krak! and Brother, I'm Dying have earned her a MacArthur ""genius"" grant and National Book Award nominations. Yet despite international acclaim and the relevance of her writings to postcolonial, feminist, Caribbean, African diaspora, Haitian, literary, and global studies, Danticat's work has not been the subject of a full-length interpretive literary analysis until now. In Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary, Nadege T. Clitandre offers a comprehensive analysis of Danticat's exploration of the dialogic relationship between nation and diaspora. Clitandre argues that Danticat-moving between novels, short stories, and essays-articulates a diasporic consciousness that acts as a form of social, political, and cultural transformation at the local and global level. Using the echo trope to approach Danticat's narratives and subjects, Clitandre effectively navigates between the reality of diaspora and imaginative opportunities that diasporas produce. Ultimately, Clitandre calls for a reconstitution of nation through a diasporic imaginary that informs the way people who have experienced displacement view the world and imagine a more diverse, interconnected, and just future.

This multi-volume work is a reprint of Israel Davidson's classic opus, with a new introduction by piyyut scholar Michael Rand.

In this dynamic exploration of the discipline of creative writing, Graeme Harper departs from the established 'how-to' model in a personal manifesto which analyses why human beings are, and have long been, passionate about writing. Illuminating the five essential keys to creative writing, directly related to the desire to undertake it, Harper analyses creative writing's past and ponders its future, drawing on theories of the self, cultural interaction, consumption and communication. Blending practice-based critical context with contemporary creative writing theory, this book is an ideal companion for undergraduate and postgraduate students of creative writing and literature. Lively and thought-provoking, it is an invaluable tool for all aspiring and established writers who wish to harness the positive effects of their craft.

A field guide to the trade and art of editing, this book pulls back the curtain on the day-to-day responsibilities of a literary magazine editor in their role, and to the specific skills necessary to read, mark-up and transform a piece of writing. Combining a break-down of an editor's tasks - including creating a vision, acquisitions, responding to submissions and corresponding with authors - with a behind-the-scenes look at manuscripts in progress, the book rounds up with a test editing section that teaches, by way of engaging exercises, the nitty-gritty strategies and techniques for working on all kinds of texts. Generous in its insight and access to practicing editors' annotations and thought processes, The Invisible Art of Literary Editing offers an exclusive look at nonfiction, fiction and poetry manuscripts as they were first submitted, as they were marked up by an editor and how the final piece was presented before featuring an interview with the editor on the choices they made about that piece of work, as well as their philosophies and working practices in their job. As a skill and a trade learnt through practice and apprenticeship, this is the ultimate companion to editing any piece of work, offering opportunities for learning-by-doing through exercises, reflections and cases studies, and inviting readers to embody the role of an editor to improve their craft and demystify the processes involved in this exciting and highly coveted profession.