'Fascinating, hugely entertaining, instructive in the best sense. I always thought that writing could not be taught, only reading, but this book made me reconsider. I read it in one sitting' Alberto Manguel 'Both extremely funny and deeply sad, The Writing School examines how and why we tell our own stories. It's beautifully written and structured, compelling, wise and fabulously readable' Lissa Evans 'The Writing School is an extraordinary book. It is funny, exhilarating, heart-breaking and passionate. Its delicate pulsing themes are held like a bird in the writer's confident, gentle hand' Katharine Norbury 'Life, with its unexpected troughs and highs, the disciplines of teaching a creative writing course and the shadow of a family tragedy provide the focus for a memoir that brims with humour, honesty and intelligence. The Writing School taught me a lot' Elizabeth Buchan A creative writing course is a chance for reinvention. When author Miranda France sets off to teach at a residential writing school in a remote valley, she expects to meet a group of aspiring writers with the usual mix of hope and unrealised ambitions, talents and motivation. Over the course of the week they spend together, personalities will clash, egos will need to be tamed or gently encouraged. What France doesn't expect, as she takes her tutees through a series of exercises designed to help them explore different aspects of their writing, is that a ghost from her own life will join them. Memories resurface concerning a death that profoundly shaped the author's world when she was a teenager, and her past interweaves with her present task of thinking about writing and storytelling, as she too becomes a student: asking, what is to be done with our memories of those we have lost? What is behind the urge to put lives into words? And is it ever right to tell another person's story? Blending storytelling and memoir, packed full of literary anecdote and insight, The Writing School is a moving and often very funny book about why people write, as well as being a uniquely generous masterclass on the art of writing itself.

'Both extremely funny and deeply sad, The Writing School examines how and why we tell our own stories. It's beautifully written and structured, compelling, wise and fabulously readable' Lissa Evans 'The Writing School is an extraordinary book. It is funny, exhilarating, heart-breaking and passionate. Its delicate pulsing themes are held like a bird in the writer's confident, gentle hand' Katharine Norbury 'Life, with its unexpected troughs and highs, the disciplines of teaching a creative writing course and the shadow of a family tragedy provide the focus for a memoir that brims with humour, honesty and intelligence. The Writing School taught me a lot' Elizabeth Buchan A creative writing course is a chance for reinvention. When author Miranda France sets off to teach at a residential writing school in a remote valley, she expects to meet a group of aspiring writers with the usual mix of hope and unrealised ambitions, talents and motivation. Tensions are bound to emerge over the course of the week they spend together: personalities will clash, egos will need to be tamed or gently encouraged. What France doesn't expect, as she takes her tutees through a series of exercises designed to help them explore different aspects of their writing, is that a ghost from her own life will join them. As the daily drama of the writing school unfurls, so memories resurface concerning a death that profoundly shaped the author's world when she was a teenager. Soon France's memories interweave with her present task of thinking about writing and storytelling, and she too becomes a student: asking, what is to be done with our memories of those we have lost? What is behind the urge to put lives into words? And is it ever right to tell another person's story? A delightful and unusual blend of storytelling and memoir, packed full of literary anecdote and insight from the author's own experience as well as that of other writers and poets, The Writing School is a moving and often very funny book about why people write, as well as being a uniquely generous masterclass on the art of writing itself.

"An agile novel written in a language perfectly pitched for the subject matter, a ruthless dissection of a fast decaying society"--Jose Saramago, Nobel Prize winner

The English translation of hit novel "Las Viudas de Los Jueves"

"Pineiro's clever U.S. debut.. . illuminates the hypocrisies of the country's upper classes after 9/11."--"Publishers Weekly"

"Pineiro is particularly skilful at exposing the social forces undermining Argentine society, and the fragility of personal relationships. We learn the surprising truth of the three men's death in the final chapter; the build-up to it is riveting."--"The Times (London)"

"Pineiro builds up tension through banal, domestic details and the accretion of despair in everyday marital and professional struggles. There may be bloody murder at the centre of this novel, but the dystopia portrayed is an indictment not solely of an assassin but of Argentina's class structure and the willful blindness of its petty bourgeoisie."--"Times Literary Supplement"

"A razor-sharp psychological and social portrait not only of Argentina, but of the afluent Western world as a whole."--Rosa Montero

Three bodies lie at the bottom of a swimming pool in a gated country estate near Buenos Aires. It's Thursday night at the magnificent Scaglia house. Behind the locked gates, shielded from the crime, poverty, and filth of the people on the streets, the Scaglias and their friends hide lives of infidelity, alcoholism, and abusive marriage. Claudia Pineiro's novel eerily foreshadowed a criminal case that generated a scandal in the Argentine media. But this is more than a story about crime. The suspense is a byproduct of Pineiro's hand at crafting a psychological portrait of a professional class that lives beyond its means and leads secret lives of deadly stress and despair. It takes place during the post-9/11 economic meltdown in Argentina, but it is a universal story that will resonate among credit-crunched readers of today.

The film of "Thursday Night Widows," by Argentine New Wave and award-winning director Marcelo Pineyro is coming soon with trailers available online.

Claudia Pineiro was a journalist, playwright, and television scriptwriter and in 1992 won the prestigious Pleyade Annual Journalism Award. She has more recently turned to fiction and is the author of literary crime novels that are all bestsellers in Latin America and have been translated into four languages. This novel won the Clarin Prize for fiction and is her first title to be available in English.

In the century after the French Revolution, the South American outpost of Guiana became a depository for exiles outcasts of the new French citizenry and an experimental space for the exercise of new kinds of power and violence against marginal groups. Miranda Spieler chronicles the encounter between colonial officials, planters, and others, ranging from deported political enemies to convicts, ex-convicts, vagabonds, freed slaves, non-European immigrants, and Maroons (descendants of fugitive slaves in the forest). She finds that at a time when France was advocating the revolutionary principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, Guiana s exiles were stripped of their legal identities and unmade by law, becoming nonpersons living in limbo.

The French Revolution invented the notion of the citizen, but as Spieler shows, it also invented the noncitizen the person whose rights were nonexistent. "Empire and Underworld" discovers in Guiana s wilderness a haunting prehistory of current moral dilemmas surrounding detainees of indeterminate legal status. Pairing the history of France with that of its underworld and challenging some of the century s most influential theorists from Hannah Arendt to Michel Foucault, Spieler demonstrates how rights of the modern world can mutate into an apparatus of human deprivation.

A humorous and affectionate look at modern Spain, and a celebration of the country's greatest book, from the pen of a brilliant young writer. When in 1987 Miranda France spent a year living in Madrid, the post-dictatorship ebullience was at its height. Pornography and soft drugs were legalised alongside more basic freedoms, such as divorce, party-affiliation and kissing in the street. In 1998 she returned to make a journey through the great cities and towns of central Spain - Madrid, Toledo, Segovia, Salamanca and others. With the new prosperity, much has changed. But much has also endured, as she learns from the people she meets, who include a private detective, a shepherd, various nuns, two belly dancers and a Castilian separatist. She also discovers that Cervantes' DON QUIXOTE' published in 1605 and the most translated book after the Bible - is a work of genius which still helps to explain the Spanish character: today's Spaniards still suffer from Don Quixote's delusions, and are as stubborn, inflexible and unrealistic as they have always been.

A funny and poignant account of life in Buenos Aires, by a young prize-winning writer. In 1993 Miranda France moved to South America, drawn to Buenos Aires as the intellectual hub of the continent, with its wealth of writers and its romantic, passionate and tragic history. She found that is was all these things, but it was also a terrible place to live. The inhabitants of Buenos Aires are famously unhappy. All over South America they are known for their arrogance, their fixation of Europe and their moodiness. Very soon, Miranda France encounters' bronca' - the simmering and barely controllable rage that is a staple feature of life in the Argentinian capital. She finds that 'bronca' has deep roots: the violence and racism of the first European settlers; the dictatorships, especially in the 1970s when so many 'disappeared'; even Evita Peron, for there was no rage to rival Evita's.