English Writing

Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, E. B. White's stroll around Manhattan remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America's foremost literary figures. The New York Times named Here Is New York one of the 10 best books ever written about the metropolis, and The New Yorker called it "the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city".

What every pastor wants: more time. The clock is every pastor's nemesis. Between meetings, administration, counseling, and other duties, it's hard to find enough time for sermon prep. Unless you change the process. 8 Hours or Less will show preachers how to write the same sermons they've been writing, but in half the time.

Noted Mexican American journalist Alfredo Corchado refuses to shrink from reporting on government corruption, murders in Juarez, or the ruthless drug cartels of Mexico. One night, Corchado received a tip that he could be the next target of the Zetas, a violent paramilitary group - and that he had 24 hours to find out if the threat was true. Midnight in Mexico is the story of one man's quest to report the truth of his country - as he races to save his own life.

No one expects the police to knock on the door of the million-dollar two-story home of the perfect cul-de-sac housewife. But soccer mom Lara Love Hardin has been hiding a shady secret: she is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors’ credit cards. Lara is convicted of thirty-two felonies and becomes inmate S32179. She finds that jail is a class system with a power structure that is somewhere between an adolescent sleepover party and Lord of the Flies. But Lara quickly learns the rules and brings love and healing to her fellow inmates.

Lawrence Block is a best-selling author of popular mystery fiction. With over 30 of his works in print, he is as prolific as he is skilled. This collection of essays and articlesfrom his Writer’s Digest columns has been in print for over 20 years. Here he provides invaluable advice to the aspiring writer and the established author. Featuring a witty and honest narration from the author himself, Block presents an illuminating look into the world of the professional writer.

Part memoir and part spirit guide, Wild Words is a book about the intersection of our creative soul with everything else, and how to make peace, make priorities, and ultimately, make progress by slowing down and embracing whatever season we’re in, right now.

Communicating with Mastery provides listeners with a rich treasure trove of frameworks and tools for leadership communication as developed and taught over the past decade at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. Designed for the business leader on the go, it provides you quick access to helpful approaches to vexing communication problems leaders face today in speaking and writing to various audiences.

Four-time Emmy winner Mike Reiss - who has worked on The Simpsons continuously since episode one in 1989 - shares stories, scandals, and gossip about working with America’s most iconic cartoon family ever. Reiss explains how the episodes are created and provides an inside look at the show’s writers, animators, actors, and celebrity guests. He answers a range of questions from Simpsons fans and die-hards and reminisces about the making of perennially favorite episodes.

The secret wisdom of the Kabbalah is a secret no more! Rabbi David Aaron, best-selling author of Endless Light, Seeing G-d, and The Secret Life of God, has helped readers and students of all faiths find meaning, purpose, and personal power from the ancient teachings of the Kabbalah. Now he draws on its timeless truths to answer the questions and issues that matter to you most in Kabbalah Works.

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.

For the last several years Adm. James Stavridis and his co-author, R. Manning Ancell, have surveyed over 200 active and retired four-star military officers about their reading habits and favorite books, asking each for a list of titles that strongly influenced their leadership skills and provided them with special insights that helped propel them to success in spite of the many demanding challenges they faced. The Leader's Bookshelf synthesizes their responses to identify the top 50 books that can help virtually anyone become a better leader.

Epictetus, a Greek stoic and freed slave, ran a thriving philosophy school in Nicropolis in the early second century AD. His animated discussions were celebrated for their rhetorical wizardry and were written down by Arrian, his most famous pupil. Together with the Enchiridion, a manual of his main ideas, and the fragments collected here, The Discourses argue that happiness lies in learning to perceive exactly what is in our power to change and what is not, and in embracing our fate to live in harmony with god and nature.

Ask a scientist about Hollywood, and you'll probably get eye rolls. But ask someone in Hollywood about science, and they'll see dollar signs: Moviemakers know that science can be the source of great stories, with all the drama and action that blockbusters require. That's a huge mistake, says Randy Olson: Hollywood has a lot to teach scientists about how to tell a story - and, ultimately, how to do science better. With Houston, We Have a Narrative, he lays out a stunningly simple method for turning the dull into the dramatic.

Theme—the mysterious cousin of plot and character. Too often viewed as abstract rather than actionable, theme is frequently misunderstood and left to chance. Some writers even insist theme should not be purposefully implemented. This is unfortunate, because in many ways theme is story. Theme is the heart, the meaning, the point. Nothing that important should be overlooked. Powerful themes are never incidental. They emerge from the conjunction of strong plots and resonant character arcs.

The Artist's Way is the seminal book on the subject of creativity. An international best seller, millions have found it to be an invaluable guide to living the artist's life. Still as vital today, or perhaps even more so, than it was when it was first published one decade ago, it is a powerfully provocative and inspiring work.

This is an exuberant group portrait of four extraordinary writers, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, and Edna Ferber, whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors captured the spirit of the 1920s.

Drawn from the author's own mystical illumination, this book reveals the truth buried within the stories of the old and new testaments alike. Briefly, the book states that consciousness is the one and only reality, that consciousness is the cause and manifestation is the effect.

The Power of Memoir is a pioneering how-to book that provides a new step-by-step program to use memoir writing as a therapeutic process. By going through these steps, you'll learn how to choose the significant milestones and turning points that make up a coherent story leading to a life-changing epiphany.

In Morocco is Edith Wharton's remarkable account of her journey to that country during World War I. With her characteristic sense of adventure, Wharton set out to explore Morocco and its people, traveling by military jeep to Rabat, Moulay Idriss, Fez, and Marrakech, from the Atlantic coast to the high Atlas. Along the way, she witnessed religious ceremonies and ritual dances, visited the opulent palaces of the Sultan, and was admitted to the mysterious world of his harem.

This new edition of a best-selling evangelical survey of the Old Testament has been thoroughly updated and retains the pedagogical features that have made the work so popular.