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Untheories of Fiction
This book takes a closer look at the diversity of fiction writing from Diderot to Markson and by so doing call into question the notion of a singular “theory of fiction,” especially in relation to the novel. Unlike Forster’s approach to “Aspects of the Novel,” which implied there is only one kind of novel to which there may be an aspect, this book deconstructs how one approach to studying something as protean as the novel cannot be accomplished. To that end, the text uses Diderot’s This Is Not A Story (1772) and David Markson’s This Is Not A Novel (2016) as a frame and imbedded within are essays on De Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room (1829), Machado de Assis’s Posthumous Memoirs Of Braz Cubas (1881), André Breton’s Nadja (1928) and Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept (1945).
Character and Conflict
Starting with general principles, this book takes you step by step through every aspect of generating compelling characters and gripping conflicts.
Mad Diary of Malcolm Malarkey
A Gogolian nightmare from the point of view of a small-town English professor
Dante's Foil and Other Sporting Tales
This collection of sporting tales mashes literary history and sports lore into a satirical inferno-skewering academic jargon and postmodern analysis with a razor-sharp, poison-tipped foil. Axelrod mischievously injects the ancients with steroids and offers statistics to prove how little we know about the origin of our favorite pastimes. Inside you'll discover the "Baudelaire-Bird Connection or, How the Boston Celtics Got To Be That Way"; the obscure "Russian Sport of Face Slapping"; "Metaleptic Parabasis or, the Fine Art of High Jumping"; "Jai-Alai Machu Picchu," and many other strange feats of Physical Lit-ness. Arm yourself with these tales and head to the nearest sports bar or poetry reading and laugh your ass off.
Borges' Travel, Hemingway's Garage
The author has scoured Europe and the Americas photographing products and businesses that bear the great names of Western civilization and then recounted the little-known turns of fate by which the immortals ended in these mundane straits.
Poetics of Prose
This creative yet scholarly book discusses prose's important relationship to close literary analysis, showing how such an approach can be beneficial for readers, scholars, and writers alike. Bringing together a literary history that consists of writers such as Lermontov, Chekhov, Camus, and Calvino, Mark Axelrod masterfully interweaves discussions of structure, context, genre, plot, and other key elements often applied to poetry but seldom applied to various forms of prose in order to offer bold and surprisingly fresh claims about the writer's purpose. By peeling back these layers of technique and style, this book opens up discussions to better understand and appreciate great dramatists, writers, and poets throughout time by returning back to the core elements that originally comprised their writing crafts.
Madness in Fiction
This book examines one work dealing with madness from each of five prominent authors. Including discussion of Fowles, Hamsun, Hesse, Kafka, and Poe, it delineates the specific type of madness the author associates with each text, and explores the reason for that - such as a historical moment, physical pressure (such as starvation), or the author’s or his narrator’s perspective. The project approaches the texts it explores from the perspective of a writer of fiction as well as from the perspective of a critic, and discusses them as unique manifestations of literary madness. It is of particular significance for those interested in the interplay of fiction, literary criticism, and psychology.
Constructing Dialogue
Unlike most screenwriting guides that generally analyze several aspects of screenwriting, Constructing Dialogue is devoted to a more analytical treatment of certain individual scenes and how those scenes were constructed to be the most highly dramatic vis á vis their dialogue. In the art of screenwriting, one cannot separate how the scene is constructed from how the dialogue is written. They are completely interwoven. Each chapter deals with how a particular screenwriter approached dialogue relative to that particular scene's construction. From Citizen Kane to The Fisher King the storylines have changed, but the techniques used to construct scene and dialogue have fundamentally remained the same. The author maintains that there are four optimum requirements that each scene needs in order to be successful: maintaining scenic integrity; advancing the storyline, developing character, and eliciting conflict and engaging emotionally. Comparing the original script and viewing the final movie, the student is able to see what exactly was being accomplished to make both the scene and the dialogue work effectively.
No Symbols Where None Intended: Literary Essays from Laclos to Beckett
An homage to Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, this collection of essays sheds new light on canonical authors such as Ibsen, Beckett, and Strindberg. Using style and structure as the connective thread, Mark Axelrod joins a wide and deep conversation on writers on writing.
I Read it at the Movies
"In I Read It at the Movies, Mark Axelrod, a veteran screenwriter, fiction writer, and literature professor, alerts you to the pitfalls that sink poorly written adaptations, describes which writing tools to hone for this kind of work, and tells you exactly how to use them. Axelrod leads you through a close reading of four films made from adapted screenplays - Bladerunner, Death in Venice, Lolita, and The Postman - examining in detail what choices the writer made and whether those choices succeeded. He ultimately leads you to understand why a script devoted to the letter of its source work is less desirable and less likely to be well received than one embodying the originating story's spirit."--BOOK JACKET.
