How do you write a novel? Practising novelists and teachers of creative writing reveal their working methods and offer practical advice. Subjects covered range from magic realism to characterisation, surrealism to historical fiction, via perspective, plot twists and avoiding being boring, among many others. This book is for creative writing students writers and readers of novels teachers of creative writing With contributions from Leone Ross, Tom Bromley, Jenn Ashworth, AJ Dalton, Nikesh Shukla, Stella Duffy, Mark Morris, Alison Moore, Nicholas Royle, Alice Thompson, Kerry Hudson, Toby Litt, Livi Michael, Joe Stretch, James Miller, Sarah Butler, Will Wiles, Graeme Shimmin Featuring Eighteen specially commissioned essays Creative writing exercises Top tips Lists of recommended novels

Edwin Paine and Charles Roland have a lot in common - they’re both English schoolboys who love a good detective story, and they’ve been known to dabble in mystery-solving themselves. They’re also both dead, a condition which has proven to be less of a hindrance than one might think. From the pages of THE SANDMAN, Neil Gaiman's intrepid dead schoolboys head back to the horror that is St. Hilarions School; the place where they both were murdered. This volume collects Toby Litt and Mark Buckingham's Dead Boy Detectives #1-12, as well as well as the short stories “Run Ragged� from Witching Hour #1, Ghosts #1 and Time Warp #1.

Toby Litt is best known for his "hip-lit" fiction, which, in its sharing of characters and themes across numerous stories and novels, has always taken an unusual, hybrid form. In Mutants, he applies his restless creativity to nonfiction. The book brings together twenty-six essays on a range of diverse topics, including writers and writing, and the technological world that informs and underpins it. Each essay is marked by Litt's distinct voice, heedless of formal conventions and driven by a curiosity and a determination to give even the shortest piece enough conceptual heft to make it come alive. Taken as a whole, these pieces unexpectedly cohere into a manifesto of sorts, for a weirder, wilder, more willful fiction. Praise for Toby Litt "A genuinely individual talent with a positive relish for dealing with the contemporary aspects of the modern world."--Scotsman "Toby Litt is awfully good--he gives something new every time he writes."--Muriel Spark "He has invented a fresh, contemporary style--it will sing in the ears of this generation."--Malcolm Bradbury

Edwin Paine and Charles Rowland are no different than most boys. They love adventure, games, and spending time outdoors. They’re curious about girls, curious about life, and particularly curious when it comes to mysteries. You see, Edwin Paine and Charles Rowland happen to be two of the best detectives in England. Note that we didn’t say living in England. That’s because Edwin and Charles aren’t living in England. In fact, they’re not living at all. Collects The Dead Boy Detectives #1-12, Sandman Presents: Dead Boy Detectives #1-4, The Sandman #25, The Children's Crusade #1-2, Ghosts#1, The Witching Hour #1, Time Warp #1, Doom Patrol Annual #2, and Swamp Thing Annual #7.

A companion piece to the popular Directions to Servants, Polite Conversation is a witty, brilliantly conceived treatise on manners and small talk from the master of English satire. Beginning with an "expert" introduction to the perils of ill-educated discourse, Swift seeks to offer a remedy for conversational disasters. His aim: to ensure one is always equipped with the correct response, no matter the situation, and the means with which to stoke up conversation when it lapses into awkward silence. To prove his theses, he then proffers three mock dialogues, citing the drawing room as the most suitable place to display the art of elegant and polite conversation. The result is a hilarious and deeply ironic analysis that is as relevant today as when it was first conceived. Irish clergyman and satirist Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is best remembered for his philosophical parody Gulliver's Travels.

Toby Litt is one of that rare breed of fiction writers who never writes the same book twice: every time out, he takes an unexpected new tack and his readers happily follow. Told in the form of the pithy, even lyrical advice a young soldier leaves behind after a mission gone wrong, Notes for a Young Gentleman is no exception. Its brilliantly creative form, and the epigrammatic genius Litt displays in its creation, nonetheless can't hide the powerful, emotional story at its heart: of a young soldier parachuting toward a beautiful, moonlit country house on a mission ...of betrayal. The house? Marlborough. The target? Winston Churchill, an old friend of his father. A brilliant, at times dizzying but always heartfelt exploration of love, revenge, and the essence of a gentleman, Notes for a Young Gentleman is classic Toby Litt: wholly new and wholly unforgettable.

With an introduction by Toby Litt In his heyday, during the 1960s and early 1970s, B. S. Johnson was one of the best-known novelists in Britain. A passionate advocate for the avant-garde, he became famous for his forthright views on the future of the novel and for his unique ways of putting them into practice. Johnson said of the acerbically comic and exuberant Albert Angelo that it was where he 'really discovered what he should be doing'. On page 163 of this extraordinary book is one of the most surprising lines in English fiction. But you should start at the beginning. The eponymous Albert is an architect by training but a supply teacher out of necessity. Feeling that he is failing at both, and haunted by a failed love affair, he begins to question what he wants to achieve. Using a number of original narrative techniques Johnson attempts to reproduce life (and its travails) as closely as possible through fiction, while at the same time revelling in the impossibility of such a task.

Emotionally compelling and formally innovative, "Life-Like" is Toby Litt's most ambitious collection of short stories to date, bringing to fruition themes first aired in his previous books, "Adventures in Capitalism," "Exhibitionism, " and "I Play the Drums in a Band Called ""Okay. Life-Like" is a book about our globalizing and atomizing world--with stories set in India, Sweden, Australia, and Iran--that also looks at how we meet and fail to meet and what connects us to one another, as well as waste and communication, and, in turn, communication through waste.
The twenty-six stories begin with Paddy and Agatha, an English couple last seen in Litt's "Ghost Story. "Following the stillbirth of their second child, their marriage has gently begun to collapse. Paddy and Agatha both meet someone else. First, Paddy meets Kavita, and Agatha meets John. Then each of these four engages with a different new person--and so on, through a doubling and redoubling of intimately interconnected stories. The remaining short stories exemplify Litt's impressive, unflinching prose.