English Writing

There's a mantra real writers know but wannabe writers don’t. And the secret phrase is this: "Nobody wants to read your shit." Recognizing this painful truth is the first step in the writer's transformation from amateur to professional.

Ready to build a fairy tale? First, you’ll need the right tools. Open this title in the Writer’s Toolbox series and discover plenty of tips and tools to get you started. Soon you’ll be writing magical adventures like a pro!

Ready to build a poem? First, you’ll need the right tools. Open this title in the Writer’s Toolbox series and discover plenty of tips and tools to get you started. Soon you’ll be writing rhythms and rhymes like a pro!

Ready to build a scary story? First, you’ll need the right tools. Open this title in the Writer’s Toolbox series and discover plenty of tips and tools to get you started. Soon you’ll be sharing scares like a pro!

Ready to build a picture book? First, you’ll need the right tools. Listen to this title in the Writer’s Toolbox series and discover plenty of tips and tools to get you started. Soon you’ll be writing and showing stories like a pro!

Shaka Senghor was raised in a middle-class neighborhood on Detroit’s east side during the height of the 1980s crack epidemic. An honor roll student and a natural leader, he dreamed of becoming a doctor—but at age eleven, his parents’ marriage began to unravel, and beatings from his mother worsened, which sent him on a downward spiral. He ran away from home, turned to drug dealing to survive, and ended up in prison for murder at the age of nineteen, full of anger and despair.

Since 1844, the Globe and Mail and its predecessor, George Brown’s Globe, have chronicled Canada: as a colony, a dominion, and a nation. To mark the paper’s 180th anniversary, Globe writers explored thirty issues and events in which the national newspaper has influenced the course of the country: Confederation, settler migrations, regional tensions, tussles over language, religion, and race. The essays reveal a tapestry of progress, conflict, and still-incomplete reconciliation.

What would happen if you were cycling to the office and just kept on pedalling? Needing a change, Mike Carter did just that. Following the Thames to the sea he embarked on an epic 5,000-mile ride around the entire British coastline—the equivalent of London to Calcutta. He encountered drunken priests, drag queens and gnome sanctuaries. He met fellow travellers and people building for a different type of future. He also found a spirit of unbelievable kindness and generosity that convinced him that Britain is anything but broken.

More than a decade before the release of the book that would make him famous, Robert M. Pirsig had already caught hold of the central theme that would animate Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Though he was revered by fans who considered him a guru, the famously private Pirsig published only two books and consented to few interviews and almost no public appearances. Now, for the first time, listeners will be granted access to five decades of Pirsig’s personal writings in this posthumous collection that illuminates the evolution of his thinking to an unprecedented degree.

Ten Years a Nomad is for travel junkies, the travel-curious, and anyone interested in what you can learn about the world when you don’t have a cable bill for a decade or spend a month not wearing shoes living on the beach in Thailand.

Want to self-publish your book but don't know where to start? Worried it's too complex or you don't have the right skills? This updated and expanded Fourth edition of Successful Self-Publishing provides everything you need to successfully self-publish your book in ebook, print, and audio formats, plus proven marketing strategies to reach more readers/listeners. Written by award-winning, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Joanna (J.F.) Penn, this practical guide shares the exact methods used to publish more than forty books and build a multi-six-figure author business.

With passion and wit, Mary Oliver skillfully imparts expertise from her long, celebrated career as a disguised poet. She walks listeners through exactly how a poem is built, from meter and rhyme, to form and diction, to sound and sense, drawing on poems by Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and others. This handbook is an invaluable glimpse into Oliver’s prolific mind—a must-have for all poetry-lovers.

From a young age Kerouac was a spiritual thinker and questioner, and he always considered himself a spiritual writer. Buddhism gave more meaning to Jack’s work as a writer: he was working not for personal accomplishment and glory but for human betterment. And Buddhism justified his lifestyle: with its vision of the material world as empty and illusory, he was free to do what he wanted.

Drawing from her twenty years of teaching experience and her bestselling Substack newsletter, For Dear Life, Maggie Smith breaks down creativity into ten essential elements: attention, wonder, vision, play, surprise, vulnerability, restlessness, tenacity, connection, and hope. Each element is explored through short, inspiring, and craft-focused essays, followed by generative writing prompts. Dear Writer provides tools that artists of all experience levels can apply to their own creative practices and carry with them into all genres and all areas of life.

Traveling in a canoe along the Yukon River with the migrating salmon, a three-month journey through untrammeled wilderness, Adam Weymouth traces the profound interconnectedness of the people and the Chinook through searing portraits of the individuals he encounters. He offers a powerful, nuanced glimpse into the erosion of indigenous culture and into our ever-complicated relationship with the natural world. Weaving in the history of the salmon run and their mysterious life cycle, Kings of the Yukon is extraordinary adventure and nature writing and social history at its most compelling.

The Great Railway Bazaar is Paul Theroux's account of his epic journey by rail through Asia. Filled with evocative names of legendary train routes - the Direct-Orient Express, the Khyber Pass Local, the Delhi Mail from Jaipur, the Golden Arrow to Kuala Lumpur, the Hikari Super Express to Kyoto, and the Trans-Siberian Express - it describes the many places, cultures, sights and sounds he experienced and the fascinating people he met.

Vagabonding is about taking time off from your normal life - from six weeks to four months to two years - to discover and experience the world on your own terms. Veteran shoestring traveler Rolf Potts shows how anyone armed with an independent spirit can achieve the dream of extended overseas travel.

Colour unlocks the history of the colours of the rainbow, and reveals how paints came to be invented, discovered, traded and used. This remarkable and beautifully written book, part travelogue part narrative history, remembers a time when red paint was really the colour of blood, when orange was the poison pigment, blue as expensive as gold and yellow made from the urine of cows force-fed with mangoes. It looks at how green was carried by yaks along the silk road, and how an entire nation was founded on the colour purple.

At the end of 2008, Ford Motor Company was just months away from running out of cash. With the auto industry careening toward ruin, Congress offered all three Detroit automakers a bailout. General Motors and Chrysler grabbed the taxpayer lifeline, but Ford decided to save itself. Under the leadership of charismatic CEO Alan Mulally, Ford had already put together a bold plan to unify its divided global operations, transform its lackluster product lineup, and overcome a dys­functional culture of infighting, backstabbing, and excuses.

Violence in the Old Testament has long been a stumbling block for Christians and skeptics alike. God Is a Man of War offers a fresh interpretation of Old Testament accounts of violence, by exploring them through the twofold lens of Orthodox tradition and historical context. Father Stephen De Young examines what these difficult passages reveal about the nature of Christ and His creation, bearing witness to a world filled not only with pain and suffering - often of human making - but also with the love of God.