Awaiting a TV talk show appearance, John Townley is quaking with dread. He has published a best-selling memoir about the Iraq War, a page-turner climaxing in atrocity. In a green room beyond the soundstage, he braces himself to confront the charismatic soldier at the violent heart of it. But John has never actually seen the man before—nor served in Iraq, nor the military. Even so, and despite the deception, he knows his fabricated memoir contains stunning truths. By turns comic, suspenseful, bitingly satirical, and emotionally potent, A Big Enough Lie pits personal mistruths against national ones of life-and-death consequence. Tracking a writer from the wilds of Florida to New York cubicles to Midwestern workshops to the mindscapes of Baghdad—and from love to heartbreak to solitary celebrity—Bennett’s novel probes our endlessly frustrated desire to grab hold of something (or somebody) true.
During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free world. Novels, stories, plays, and poems, they believed, could inoculate weak minds against simplistic totalitarian ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of global catastrophe, and just maybe prevent the like from happening again. As the Cold War began, high-minded and well-intentioned scholars, critics, and writers from across the political spectrum argued that human values remained crucial to civilization and that such values stood in dire need of formulation and affirmation. They believed that the complexity of literature—of ideas bound to concrete images, of ideologies leavened with experiences—enshrined such values as no other medium could. Creative writing emerged as a graduate discipline in the United States amid this astonishing swirl of grand conceptions. The early workshops were formed not only at the time of, but in the image of, and under the tremendous urgency of, the postwar imperatives for the humanities. Vivid renderings of personal experience would preserve the liberal democratic soul—a soul menaced by the gathering leftwing totalitarianism of the USSR and the memory of fascism in Italy and Germany. Workshops of Empire explores this history via the careers of Paul Engle at the University of Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. In the story of these founding fathers of the discipline, Eric Bennett discovers the cultural, political, literary, intellectual, and institutional underpinnings of creative writing programs within the university. He shows how the model of literary technique championed by the first writing programs—a model that values the interior and private life of the individual, whose experiences are not determined by any community, ideology, or political system—was born out of this Cold War context and continues to influence the way creative writing is taught, studied, read, and written into the twenty-first century.
Poetry comes in many guises, it can be written as a profession, with the poetic correctness that complies, or by the everyday multitude who write about anything and everything, with no boundaries to contain their skills. Poetry is often used to convey thoughts and messages that might not be acceptable in other forms. For the many who write poems for the pleasure of self expression, it is often triggered by the desire to record situation or subject in verse, where it can be any combination of truth and fantasy, often bing left for the reader to interpret. My poems have been compiled over many years, yet are mostly ageless: flowers that bloom to greet us will bloom again next year. The attraction of putting a twist in the tale of a poem is always a temptation and a challenge, yet it can often turn sadness into laughter. Poetry is the choice of the reader... I do hope that you may enjoy my humble compositions. -- Eric Bennett
Learning to code is an attractive option for many parents and elementary-aged students. Most simple computer programs, however, rely on math concepts that are not yet part of a typical, elementary school curriculum. This text solves that problem by presenting math concepts selected for their importance to computer science in a way that is accessible to a younger audience through: visual models and worked examples; thoughtfully sequenced, scaffolded practice problems; written introductions, illustrations and word problems that provide real-world context; coding examples and projects written in Python; coding challenges and extensions; solutions to all practice problems, comprehension questions and selected challenges. While many math and computer science courses equip students to complete problems by rote and copy an instructor's code, this curriculum is aimed toward facilitating the meaningful learning necessary for students to solve problems and produce original work. Note: it is recommended that students are reading at a third grade level and familiar with whole-number addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
This book is a factual story of the ups and downs in the life of a British Merchant Seaman during the 1940's and 50's. The book is neither an accusation nor a confession, the names and identifying details of the individuals have been changed to protect their privacy'.
This fully updated Textbook for Pearson Edexcel A-level Politics will help your students develop a critical understanding of the latest developments in US Government and Politics. This trusted textbook by Anthony J Bennett, revised by David Tuck and Simon Lemieux, is specially designed to reflect the Edexcel specification and help your students approach complex topics with confidence. This Student Textbook: - Comprehensively covers the Government and Politics of the USA, including the 2020 Presidential elections - Places recent developments in a historical context throughout to show the influence of political history on current events - Builds your confidence by highlighting key terms and explaining synoptic links between different topics in the specification - Develops your analysis and evaluation skills through activities, debates and practice questions - Provides answer guidance for practice questions online at www.hoddereducation.co.uk
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