Bent Northrop Memorial Library

The authors share stories from their literary friendship and respective careers, offering insight into writing principles and mechanics that they have identified as elementary to quality prose.

Abdul loves telling stories but thinks his messy handwriting and spelling mistakes will keep him from becoming an author, until Mr. Muhammad visits and encourages him to persist

Rich in playful double entendres, digressions, formal oddities, and typographical experiments, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman provoked a literary sensation when it first appeared in England in a series of volumes from 1759 to 1767. An ingeniously structured novel (about writing a novel) that fascinates like a verbal game of chess, Tristram Shandy is the most protean and playful English novel of the eighteenth century and a celebration...

Entrusted with her late husband's discovery of extraterrestrial life and enlisted by her dead husband's friend, anthropologist Pierre Saad, to help him smuggle a newly discovered artifact out of Egypt -- an ancient codex concerning the human authorship of the Book of Genesis -- Lucy Bergmann crash lands her plane on a slip of land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the Middle East. Burned in the crash landing, she is rescued by Adam, a delusional...

"The life of a book isn't easy, especially when people judge you by your cover (not every book can be adorned with sparkly unicorns!). And this narrator should know--it's the book itself, and it has a lot of opinions. It gets irritated when readers bend its pages back, and it finds authors quite annoying. But it does have a story to tell. Through witty direct address and charming illustrations, readers meet a book that has never been read, with a...

A fifteen-year-old "geek" who keeps a list of the high school jocks and others who torment him, and pours his energy into creating a great graphic novel, encounters Kyra, Goth Girl, who helps change his outlook on almost everything, including himself.

The inspiring sequel to the 2015 Parent's Choice Winner, How to Read a Story!
Step 1: Choose an idea for your story. A good one.
Step 2: Decide on a setting. Don't be afraid to mix things up.
Step 3: Create a heroine—or a hero.
Now: Begin.
Accomplished storytellers Kate Messner and Mark Siegel playfully chronicle the process of becoming a writer in this fun follow-up to How to Read a Story, guiding young storytellers through...

"Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he's teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what's left of his self-respect; he hasn't written--let alone published--anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he doesn't need Jake's help because the plot of his book in progress is a sure thing, Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast...

Presents an illustrated edition of Sarah Orne Jewett's series of sketches set in a small, coastal town in Maine which evoke the decline of coastal New England in the late nineteenth century.

"On a famous Australian train between Darwin and Adelaide for the Mystery Writers' Society one of the attendees is murdered for real in the new mystery from the author of Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone"--